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Comment by jbritton | Hacker News Reader

The TV news yesterday said 50% of Covid positive patients were in the hospital for non Covid reasons. This is incredible to me. Is 50% of the general population Covid positive? Are people heading to hospital more likely to be exposed to Covid than the general population, perhaps via doctor visits. While that does seem possible, 50% still seems incredible to me. Is there something wrong with testing?

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50% of the patients coming into that hospital, that's not 50% of the general population at large.

I’m asking why a random sampling of hospitalizations for non Covid reasons would be significantly different than the general population with respect to likelihood of Covid infection.

It's hard to tell exactly what the "TV" meant, but the two statements "50% of positives were admitted for non-covid reasons" and "50% of patients are positive" are not equivalent.

For example, consider a hospital with 100 patients of which 90 are negative and 10 are positive. Of the 10 positive, 5 were admitted for covid and 5 for some other reason. Thus, 10% of all patients are positive, but the "TV" statement still holds.

That being said, the number of people who have had covid appears to be much larger than people seem to think. https://covidestim.org/us/MA estimates that 73% +- 20% of the MA population was infected at some point before Jan 8 2022. Like everything else, take all estimates with a grain of salt, but I have no reason to doubt those numbers.

Thanks. I think your post explains the interpretation I missed.

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