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Comment by azakai | Hacker News Reader

Yes, but that seems like a very relevant type of control group. If a person got COVID and ended up in the hospital, and that person wants to know what possible long-term harm that could cause them (that is, compared to had they not gotten COVID and not been hospitalized), then the article focused on exactly that.

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That’s what they attempt to focus on, but inadvertently introduce bias in terms of people’s proclivity to show up at the hospital for any given severity of issue.

People who present once for one thing are probably more likely to present a second time: either because they have a lower threshold for seeking help, they have overall poorer health and so present more often, or because they have a referring primary doctor who is biased towards admitting over treating outpatient.

That's a fair point. That could inflate the later admission numbers.

However, I don't think it can explain the far higher death rate.

The poorer general health one it seems would have a bias towards all-cause mortality rate, though perhaps not to the full magnitude as observed.

Possibly. But poorer general health is something they explicitly tried to account for with the control group, at least.

Not really. The UK has been testing pretty much everyone who's admitted to hospital for COVID since the start of the outbreak regardless of why they were admitted, which means there's going to be quite a few people in the COVID and in hospital group who were actually admitted due to other, unrelated conditions. Particularly if they were being admitted to hospital regularly...

Good question to ask, but no, they didn't look at people who tested positive but were admitted for something else:

> Individuals were included if they had a hospital episode from 1 January to 31 August 2020 with a primary diagnosis of covid-19

(from the full paper)

And throughout their stay. My father was vaccinated in January, went into hospital after a siezure (not unknown) a in mid febuary, he was tested on arrival, and was negative. Continued to be tested, and by early march (2 weeks after admittance) he tested positive.

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