The Ontario government released its most recent data on COVID hospitalizations, showing that 46 per cent of all COVID-positive patients counted as a COVID hospitalization aren’t even in the hospital for COVID.
We are updating Ontario's public reporting to distinguish patients hospitalized due to #COVID19 from those admitted for other reasons with COVID-19.
— Christine Elliott (@celliottability) January 11, 2022
While this doesn't change the serious situation in Ontario's hospitals, it is important to share this data to provide additional context on the state of the pandemic.
This information will begin to be reported on https://t.co/dVoqvQLuFb tomorrow.
— Christine Elliott (@celliottability) January 11, 2022
According to Ontario’s most recent data, 46 per cent of general COVID hospitalizations and 17 per cent of the supposed ICU patients aren’t even a result of COVID. Instead, they are incidental, meaning they went to the hospital for something totally different and tested positive after arrival.
This is huge and is something many have wanted confirmation for throughout the pandemic: how many people are actually sick from COVID. Why wasn’t this distinction made earlier and disseminated to the public?
As columnist Anthony Furey explained in a Tweet, “By the way, the reason this is only coming out today is because they only updated their data entry to include fields for this on Friday.”
Additionally, there are currently 3,220 people in the hospital who have tested positive for COVID-19, of which 477 are in the ICU.
Of those in the hospital with COVID (whose vaccination statuses we know), 1,612 are fully vaccinated, 123 are partially vaccinated, and a mere 552 are unvaccinated. In other words, just over three-quarters of those currently in the hospital with COVID have received one of the vaccines — despite the media previously claiming that it’s a ‘pandemic of the unvaccinated.’
With that said, of those in ICUs (whose vaccination statuses we know), 158 are fully vaccinated, 14 are partially vaccinated, and 138 are unvaccinated.
This sounds bad for the unvaccinated, as, according to COVID-Tracker Canada, 82.818 per cent of all people in Ontario have received at least one dose, and 77.256 per cent of all people in Ontario are fully vaccinated; thus, 17.182 per cent remain unvaccinated in the province at the time of writing.
Though more fully vaccinated people are in the ICU, a disproportionate number of unvaccinated are in the ICU.
However, we now know that nearly half of these ICU admissions have nothing to do with COVID. If they are COVID-positive, it’s a result of being tested after they came to the hospital — this was previously called a conspiracy theory. So it’s totally incidental, and we don’t know which group has more incidental instances.
Moreover, as The Counter Signal reported on January 6, the rapid rise in cases and those supposedly in the hospital for COVID-19 is a result of over-testing, with the Ontario government administering a “whopping 59,000 in 24 hours to people who weren’t necessarily symptomatic.”
While it’s good that the Ontario government has owned up to what it has been doing all along — manipulating or omitting data to eschew the results — more coverage, particularly from the mainstream media, is desperately needed to alert the general public to the reality of the pandemic, today.
The reality is that hospitalizations from COVID are being reported at twice the rate of what it should be. But, again, they aren’t in the hospital for COVID. They’re in the hospital with COVID. There’s a big difference.
