This is a grey area here, because people don't always "come in because of COVID," they come in for symptom X, which might be exacerbated or caused by COVID. If someone has a set of chronic diseases, sure they have that, but the question is "why did they come into the ED today?" The answer to that is sometimes COVID even though they didn't know it. How this looks on a hospital chart is really fuzzy because it depends on all kinds of things; ICD coding can be ambiguous.
There's also been some cases of COVID contracted in the hospital (the ones I have person familiarity with), but that is much less rare, and rarer as the year has gone on.
There are also cases of people coming in for reasons unrelated to COVID, and finding out they were positive just coincidentally.
There's also cases where it's really unclear.
But yeah this is going to be picked up by covid-deniers as more "proof" that covid is exaggarated.
I don't think so. When assessing the impact of Covid, we look at the change in overall, all-cause numbers, like all-cause deaths. (Which do show a big impact.)
The reason we watch covid hospitalizations is that it is a good leading indicator of covid deaths. The "leading" part is important, because that allows health policy to react faster to what's happening, which makes it more effective at reducing the impact of Covid.
(You may also worry that covid deaths are being similarly over-counted, but the all-cause death numbers tell us we're actually undercounting the overall number.)
Anyway, I guess ultimately we can't stop people from misusing the covid hospitalizations number, but it is a very useful number.
US has had 1M excess deaths. That's a million people more than usual. http://www.healthdata.org/special-analysis/estimation-excess...
Covid is real. Covid numbers are inflated. You're arguing against a fictional "Covid denier" boogeyman which doesn't really exist.
You’re trying to answer what sent someone to hospital, not who has covid.
https://www.politico.com/states/florida/story/2021/07/26/sel...
Early in the pandemic, the United States had an undertesting problem. Now we are overtesting those who are immune and asymptomatic. A person with immunity to the coronavirus will fight off an infection. But during and after the person’s exposure to the virus, it’s common for a low number of virus particles to be detectable in the nose. In medicine, we call this virus a “colonizer” — a pathogen that does not cause illness or spread the illness. It’s an incidental finding. But in today’s world of routine coronavirus testing of vaccinated people, these positive tests are inflating the number of positive cases in a misleading way.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/07/21/covid-test...
It's worth noting that the CDC is explicitly telling people not to do this:
If you’ve been around someone who has COVID-19, you do not need to stay away from others or get tested unless you have symptoms. (https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/fully-vac...)
Agreed that people are still doing it though. That seems reasonable to me given the mixed data around to what degree the vaccine prevents spread.