All hospitalized omnicron cases are unvaccinated, none in ICU ( Dutch/Belgium) | Hacker News Reader

All hospitalized omnicron cases are unvaccinated, none in ICU ( Dutch/Belgium)

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12 pointsNicoJuicy8 comments

That would be a rather surprising result, given that with Delta 80% of the people in hospital were actually vaccinated and the vaccine was not working as well against Omicron.

I’m going to require some factual data before I believe this.

This is the report it is based on and included in the article: https://covid-19.sciensano.be/sites/default/files/Covid19/RA...

What you are looking for ( info about the data) is on page 13, 2nd paragraph under the graph. ( Can't copy the text on my phone)

So the reservation would be the sample size is rather small (51 persons). No idea how they selected the sample.

Sciensano is the science authority for Belgium. So I don't think there would be a lot of bias.

The same agency suggested overcounting instead of potentially undercounting, this way, not every death should be tested.

Bias is everywhere and not necessarily malicious. But if you randomly select a percentage of all positive tests for checking for which variant it is, you’ll get a different result than when you randomly check a percentage of all people who end up in the hospital.

The numbers, according to the article/pdf, are people checked in the hospital in severe condition.

Not the other way around

The paper claims this is described in the ‘clinical hospital surveillance’ and although the report about that actually does not mention sequencing or Omicron there might be a clue as to why they don’t see data on omicron patients in ICU:

https://covid-19.sciensano.be/sites/default/files/Covid19/CO...

Page 7:

> Clinical outcomes, such as ICU admission or death, are only registered at hospital discharge

[…]

> Furthermore, as ICU patients remain hospitalized for 2-3 weeks, their profile may only be available approximately 4 weeks after their initial hospital admission. To avoid misinterpretation of trends over time we do not report ICU data for the most recent 3 weeks.

https://www.hln.be/nieuws/live-alle-gehospitaliseerde-omikro...

This is about all cases that are checked on which variant they have in the hospital. The underlying report comes from the Belgian risk assessment group.

It's possible that there are some, but no one was found in that condition that was tested.

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