More Covid Narrative Fail In The Liberal Media

I’ve mentioned several times that my wife regularly tunes in CBS news radio while working in the kitchen. As a result, we’re bombarded with the usual Covid scare stories. Currently, the narrative is about hospitals filling up to overflowing--radio broadcasts don’t have fine print, but in news articles that’s where you have to look to find out that the overcrowding problem is largely due to staff shortages, often caused by vaccine mandates. Nurses are too close to the patients to be duped--high proportions want nothing to do with the injections. 

There’s another factor, however, and David Zweig at the liberal The Atlantic quietly demolishes the notion that all those people being admitted are seriously ill. He doesn’t go into the question of Covid financial bounties for hospitalizations, which I believe are still in effect. If so, the dynamic becomes even dodgier. You’ll see that if you read between the lines just a little, and it has a lot to do with testing--which, again, Zweig doesn’t question. And you can see why not, in a way. The numbers themselves, as presented, are damning enough:

Our Most Reliable Pandemic Number Is Losing Meaning

A new study suggests that almost half of those hospitalized with COVID-19 have mild or asymptomatic cases.

Mild or asymptomatic? How do you get hospitalized if you’re asymptomatic?

Therein lies the story. A research group from Harvard, Tufts, and the VA decided to try to get to the bottom of it all.

At least 12,000 Americans have already died from COVID-19 this month, as the country inches through its latest surge in cases. But another worrying statistic is often cited to depict the dangers of this moment: The number of patients hospitalized with COVID-19 in the United States right now is as high as it has been since the beginning of February. ... But how much do those latter figures really tell us?

...

If you want to make sense of the number of COVID hospitalizations at any given time, you need to know how sick each patient actually is. Until now, that’s been almost impossible to suss out. The federal government requires hospitals to report every patient who tests positive for COVID, yet the overall tallies of COVID hospitalizations, made available on various state and federal dashboards and widely reported on by the media, do not differentiate based on severity of illness. ... there are many COVID patients in the hospital with fairly mild symptoms, ..., who have been admitted for further observation on account of their comorbidities, or because they reported feeling short of breath. Another portion of the patients in this tally are in the hospital for something unrelated to COVID, and discovered that they were infected only because they were tested upon admission. ...

Now, every epidemiologist who can locate his own ass using the reliable both-hands method knows this methodology is fundamentally flawed, because the PCR test was never developed for this purpose and can’t give you the answers you’re looking for with real reliability.  You should absolutely NOT be testing anyone who is asymptomatic. What you end up with is a “casedemic”--which is good enough for government work if you can relabel it as an epi- or--even better--a pandemic. The same dynamic--counting every positive test result as an actual “case” of infection--is also at work when it comes to tabulating Covid deaths: dies with as opposed to dies from. The bottom line is that we have had, for the better part of two years, an enormous number of people being hospitalized who probably should not have been hospitalized--or, at least, not for Covid. The reasons for this--which Zweig avoids discussing--are likely a witch’s brew of financial incentives enabled by the very dodgy use of a totally inappropriate test as a “diagnostic” tool.

Zweig breaks the data down into two categories. The first is Covid positive kids--about whom we’re hearing so much.

... Did they need treatment for COVID, or was there some other reason for admission, like cancer treatment or a psychiatric episode, and the COVID diagnosis was merely incidental? According to the researchers, 40 to 45 percent of the hospitalizations that they examined were for patients in the latter group.

The second category covers Covid positive adults:

... roughly half of all the hospitalized patients showing up on COVID-data dashboards in 2021 may have been admitted for another reason entirely, or had only a mild presentation of disease.

This increase was even bigger for vaccinated hospital patients, of whom 57 percent had mild or asymptomatic disease. But unvaccinated patients have also been showing up with less severe symptoms, on average, than earlier in the pandemic: The study found that 45 percent of their cases were mild or asymptomatic since January 21. ...

Asymptomatic, meaning: maybe not Covid at all. And the Dread Delta? Maybe not so dread as we’re being told.

... this study suggests that COVID hospitalization tallies can’t be taken as a simple measure of the prevalence of severe or even moderate disease, because they might inflate the true numbers by a factor of two.

As usual, the real story here--because we already knew this in general terms--is that a liberal organ like The Atlantic has once again published an article that lets the data cat of the bag. The MSM is still doing their best to snooker the Great Unwashed, but the elite who religiously read The Atlantic know better.

It seems the wheels are coming off.