'COVID-19 Hospitalizations' Are an Increasingly Misleading Measure of Severe Disease

Because hospitalization rates reflect patients who test positive for COVID-19, they do not tell us how many were admitted for treatment of the disease or how many experienced severe symptoms.

A newly published preprint study addresses those gaps in knowledge by applying measures of disease severity to about 48,000 V.A. hospital admissions of more than 38,000 COVID-positive patients between March 1, 2020, and June 30, 2021.

Notably, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which collects data on what are commonly called "COVID-19 hospitalizations," uses a more ambiguous term: "COVID-19-associated hospitalizations." But even that description is misleading, since the tally includes many hospital patients who were not admitted for treatment of COVID-19.

The researchers cite two explanations for that trend: Vaccination protects people against severe disease even if they are infected by the coronavirus, and "Unvaccinated patients tend to be younger and healthier," meaning they are less likely to experience life-threatening systems.

Another factor could be the criteria that hospitals use for admitting COVID-19 patients, which are apt to be less demanding when the infected population becomes younger and healthier.

"If hospitalizations are used as a metric for policy decision-making, patients hospitalized for the management of COVID-19 disease should be distinguished from patients who are hospitalized and incidentally found to be infected with SARS-CoV-2." They argue that oxygen saturation levels and use of supplemental oxygen, both of which are recorded by hospitals, are handy ways to distinguish between these two groups.

"As we look to shift from cases to hospitalizations as a metric to drive policy and assess level of risk to a community or state or country," she told him, "We should refine the definition of hospitalization. Those patients who are there with rather than from COVID don't belong in the metric."

https://reason.com/2021/09/15/covid-19-hospitalizations-are-an-increasingly-misleading-measure-of-severe-disease/