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Comment by Munky-Necan | Hacker News Reader

I'm wondering how good fo a marker this is. We've already had people with significant heart attack symptoms refuse to go to the hospital, so is a similar trend happening here with COVID?

One thing I find a little suspect about this article, although I do respect Axios, is that hospital usage in Texas has not peaked yet and is currently rising (https://covid19.healthdata.org/united-states-of-america/texa...).

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just to further complicate things and show how stats are all over the place, the Texas Tribune has hospitalizations flat (even slightly decreasing on average) since about May 1

https://apps.texastribune.org/features/2020/texas-coronaviru...

Hospitalizations are a lagging indicator. The incubation period is 2 weeks, people grow sick enough to be hospitalized in week 3, and death occurs in week 4 or 5. That said, excess deaths are a reliable number, you can't fudge deaths.

I know someone who was recently hospitalized(Texas, US) but was not counted as a coronavirus patient because the test were negative(they didn’t test for anti bodies). The illness resembles almost everything I have read about people with complications from the virus. Doctors & nurses when asked, they all say that for the anti bodies test, the patient would have to go some place else.

The typical incubation period is more like 5 - 6 days. A 2 week incubation period is possible, but very rare.

> That said, excess deaths are a reliable number, you can't fudge deaths.

Excess deaths aren't a reliable indicator of COVID-19 impact because of post hoc ergo propter hoc problems.

> https://covid19.healthdata.org/united-states-of-america/texa...

Am I missing something? It doesn't look like this has any data on hospitalizations. The graphs are all based on "projected" data.

At the bottom it has hospital resource usage. It also includes what the resource usage of hospitals was, but it lags about a week behind the current date. That type of data is harder to get.

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