A new nationwide American study has found that 40 to 45 per cent of all patients reported as being hospitalized with COVID-19 were admitted to the hospital for something else, only learning they had COVID-19 after admission.
Researchers from Harvard Medical School, Tufts Medical Center, and the Veterans Affairs Healthcare System conducted the study to establish a more reliable pandemic number, as many politicians and health officials have shifted from using deaths to case numbers and now to hospitalizations to determine the severity of the disease.
However, the findings may undermine common talking points that politicians use to justify lockdowns and vaccine passports.
It should also be noted that the study is yet to be peer reviewed.
According to the researchers, while many equate every COVID hospitalization, they found that 40 to 45 per cent of hospitalization admissions are actually people admitted for something entirely different, such as cancer treatment or a psychiatric episode, and did not even know they had COVID-19.
This figure suggests that these cases are entirely incidental despite being lumped in with other statistics that politicians and the media disseminate.
To make this determination, researchers analyzed electronic records of nearly 50,000 hospital admissions across the country, checking whether a patient needed supplemental oxygen or had a low blood oxygen level. If they did, researchers classified the patient as having a severe case of COVID-19; if they did not, they were classified as having a mild or asymptomatic case. This standard is consistent with the National Institute of Health’s classification.
Researchers also stressed that even amongst those who do not incidentally have COVID-19, the severity of symptoms could range drastically from being in the hospital for a few hours and being confined to an ICU bed for days.
Additionally, researchers looked at how many patients had mild or asymptomatic cases of COVID-19 since the pandemic began. They found that the number of mild or asymptomatic cases has actually been rising, despite the recent Delta-variant scaremongering espoused by the media.
Between March 2020 and January 2021, researchers found that 36 per cent of patients who tested positive for COVID-19 had mild or asymptomatic symptoms. However, this number had risen to 48 per cent by the end of June 2021, suggesting that COVID-19 is becoming significantly less severe.
