Quote Originally Posted by noteggs View Post
I’ll concede the first point about the study. Also agree VA is a different animal for the most part. What do you expect from governmental controlled healthcare system. Sorry couldn’t resist. There are benefits to using VA data though. One being the vast amount of data that can be quickly collected. Obviously you stated the limitations.

However, not sure you can suggest they did things differently in this case. They are just reporting the covid data that was federally mandated. To my knowledge, hospital systems are not required to breakdown the severity (except for ICU rates) or when the patient tested positive before submitting.

I agreed with you at the beginning that cases and deaths were undercounted because the lack of testing. Hopefully you will agree that hospitalizations due to covid are being over counted?

As for eradication with the vaccine, that ship was never at the dock. The covid vaccines never showed a blocking mechanism of the disease. Hard to eradicate with this missing element as we’re finding out with breakthroughs and the ability to pass on the virus while vaccinated.

Eventually we were going to deal with Delta variant regardless. Heck, it was already discovered before we had FDA emergency approval. Yes not a big player at the time in the world, but would eventually because of the high transmissibility rates. Again, going back to the lack of blocking.
I’m not sure on reporting of hospitalizations. Perhaps they are over reported? I couldn’t find anything in this particular study that was referenced that the hospitalizations in the data collected were the same hospitalizations reported. Accessing electronic health records and filtering out data is fairly complex. For instance, here is a direct quote from the study in the methods section:

“All inpatient admissions to a Veterans Affairs (VA) hospital between 3/1/2020-6/30/2021 with a laboratory-confirmed diagnosis of SARS-CoV-2 up to 14 days prior to or during the admission were included, and data were extracted electronically from the VA Corporate Data Warehouse.”

How do we know which hospitalizations the VA reported? Perhaps they are reported perhaps they are not. The intent of the study is really good, and I agree that if someone is in the hospital for a presurgical procedure and tests positive it shouldn’t count as a hospitalization. I know that the two hospitals systems I have seen reports on behind the scenes do not report these as hospitalizations. They strictly report those hospitalized due to covid or complications from covid. The ICU data is particularly helpful when evaluating disease severity and burden. I’m not sure people really pay attention to it as much as covid deaths as it stands. My original point however was people such as Muskie in Dayton taking this data and interpreting it as “hospitalizations are over reported”. Are we really trying to diminish the effects this virus has at this point? The author of the Atlantic article is far from “left-leaning” as well and as always with the media (on both sides) there is an agenda that does not have the public’s best interest.

Regarding eradication, I still believe it is theoretically possible, just not practical in reality. The vaccine does block disease so I’m not sure what you mean by saying it doesn’t. It is clearly not a 100% block in everyone (some poor immune response) but it does decrease transmission, and infected individuals that are vaccinated transmit less disease as a whole. There are exceptions, and typically those with poor immune response. There aren’t really any vaccines that block disease 100%, which is why the CDC felt the need to change their definition of a vaccine. People see the word “immunity” and think it means 100% protection. Anyone that draws titers on incoming med and nursing students know very well that immunity wanes over time, and is not black and white “immune or not immune”. Delta transmissibility definitely upped the ante for covid as it will find more hosts that have lower titers. The number of people without sufficient immunity is still way too high to expect this to go away anytime soon. I do believe you will see far less breakthrough infections in those that have boosters in the next 6-8 months. Same for those with breakthrough and new infections, which is robust right now.

Escape variants will continue worldwide however until we have equitable distribution.