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Comment by listenallyall | Hacker News Reader

Isn't that highly subjective, however? Two people show up to the hospital feeling equally lousy, both test positive for Omicron. First guy says he's vaxxed and boosted, doc suggests he's fully protected, this is the worst of it, go home and rest up (which is exactly what a doctor told my father). Second guy says nope, I'm unvaxxed. Doc is probably going to admit this guy overnight for observation.

Multiply by tens of thousands, and you can project the effects on hospitalization stats, which aren't necessarily tied to the degree of illness.

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Except that with your second example the hospital isn't going to admit the patient for simply "feeling lousy". So, no, the assertion that this is how that stat has become inflated is not the actual cause.

I think you are purposely attempting to divert from the main point. Consider "lousy" to be, say, a 102 fever, persistent cough, and inability to taste anything. And then both test positive, as I stated. The unvaxxed guy is likely to be admitted, at least for observation.

If that was the case the doctors would see that the vaxed getting admited would have a higher death rate than the unvaxed as they would only admit those most likely to die from that group. If they did have a higher death rate then the stats and the doctors experience would reflect that and so the doctors would not heavily select for the unvaxxed. Though there is the possibility in your hypothetical that even the vaxxed with worse symptoms on average than the admitted unvaxed have a better chance of survival than a less symptomatic (when admitted) unvaxxed but if that's the case it pretty much shows the doctor are behaving correctly in a 'bias' of admitting unvaxxed.

The fact that "lousy" is subjective in the examples given, and is being leveraged to make your point however you see fit, at least to me, discredits the point you're attempting to make.

You're still not making any sense. The symptoms you describe wouldn't meet hospital admission criteria unless the patient had serious risk factors other than being unvaccinated. Hospital admission is primarily based on respiratory distress or blood oxygen saturation under 94%. A mild fever and cough can be managed on an outpatient basis. Ageusia is clinically irrelevant.

Perhaps, although that's assuming every doctor in every ER at every hospital in the country has the same minimum criteria. Somehow, I doubt that is the case.

What's your point? You might be able to find a few doctors who fail to follow the protocol but that has no measurable impact on the healthcare system.

It seems like you don't have any actual knowledge of how healthcare works in the real world and are just making things up.

Point is doctors are not robots, they enjoy a significant amount of autonomy, and I still believe that all other things being equal, many doctors are more likely to admit an unvaxxed Covid-positive patient than a vaxxed Covid-positive, because they believe that the unvaxxed patient has a higher risk of more serious symptoms.

So you have a belief, but no actual data or even anecdotes to back it up.

Nearly half of Omicron admissions released a day later. Did they magically recover overnight, or were they admitted with mild symptoms in the first place, just as a precautionary measure?

Early data from France suggests omicron patients leave hospital far more quickly - including 43 per cent in less than a day

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-diseas...

(at Kaiser Permanente Southern California) Among 154 Omicron variant-infected patients who completed hospitalization by January 1, 2022, 129 (83.8%) were discharged in ≤2 days

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.01.11.22269045v...

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