But I can offer up some explanations regardless, just for the sake of conversation. Any respiratory infection that gets hospitalized with high CT covid tests is capable of being a misdiagnosed CV19 infection. I'm unsure about CA, but in the US there are huge financial incentives to misdiagnose a patient as cv19+

As for record number of patients (I'll take your word for it as in the US the actual ICU numbers are lower for 2020 than 2019 and hospitalizations countrywide 2020 at no point were higher than 2019) - I think that a much more logical conclusion is that people were scared to go to the hosptial - preventative visits/treatments were delayed and now you're dealing with the predictable rise in illness due to disruption to healthcare from government regulations and overall hysteria keeping people from the hospital that would've otherwise been there.

Disruptions as small as daylight savings changes is associated with large spikes in heart attacks - it's really not surprising that global disruption will have negative health repercussions.

Just to remove doubt, the ICU has been record setting[1]. As an aside, that article even discusses your claim about bad PCR tests.

And are you saying that people have delayed their care to the point where they are now in the ICU, just under half of who are sub 50, and all those happen to be because of a respiratory infection? In addition, those peaks of ICU numbers have started to come down. It must be a coincidence that case counts have been dropping for a while here - how does that make sense if it's just people delaying care? It really doesn't meet any sort of sense that the peaks are always linked.

Alberta has put together a great data portal[2], complete with tracking case counts and severe cases. It's easy to see, based upon the actual data, how the cases, hospitalizations, and ICU are related.

[1]https://calgaryherald.com/news/local-news/alberta-icus-treat... [2]https://www.alberta.ca/stats/covid-19-alberta-statistics.htm...

Yes, I'm saying people avoided preventative care because they were scared to go near hospitals - this is not a controversial topic, it's clear that is true.

I'm not sure about your point with respiratory infections but covid goes on the death certificate with a recent positive test even if you died in a car accident.

No, I've never suggested "coincidence" with case counts and hospitalizations. It seems quite intuitive to me that false positives are happening at a similar rate as usual and more hospitalizations just means more false positives in the hospital. You get false positives with high CT - there have been multiple studies confirming this fact at this point, it's not a controversial statement as far as I'm aware.

> No, I've never suggested "coincidence" with case counts and hospitalizations. It seems quite intuitive to me that false positives are happening at a similar rate as usual and more hospitalizations just means more false positives in the hospital. You get false positives with high CT - there have been multiple studies confirming this fact at this point, it's not a controversial statement as far as I'm aware.

But these positives come BEFORE the hospitalizations and deaths. I don't feel like you're understanding the order of events - high cases AND then hospitalizations after weeks. You keep describing events where people are retroactively proven to have COVID - this isn't the case. These are people who test positive and then later enter hospital.

covid spread increases -> hospitalizations go up - we both agree on this point

covid spread increases -> false positives increase due to more viral spread that will attack asymptomatic/immune individuals (we do know that other coronaviruses have cross immunity with cv19 so it's not uncommon to be asymptomatic due to preexisting immunity)

Ok, so it sounds like you're making the argument that a patient, who has COVID in their system, but is asymptomatic and tests positive would be considered a false positive, even though they can still spread the virus?

I wasn't even aware that there was doubt that asymptomatic spread was a thing. I realize now the issue - I believe that someone who has a COVID 19 infection, symptomatic or not, is someone infected with COVID 19, and you've decided that they aren't until they show symptoms. How do you feel about HIV?

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle... https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03141-3 https://www.who.int/news-room/q-a-detail/coronavirus-disease... https://www.advisory.com/en/daily-briefing/2021/01/11/asympt...

However, I am very familiar with the study you've linked. If you can even call it a study - it's more like a fantasy model based on the data of other studies the researchers appear to not even have read! They cite numbers from multiple papers that can't be found in those papers anywhere. There might not be a more embarrassing study I've read than this one.

There first citation to Lee et. al. claims the paper found 100% infectiousness of asymptomatic individuals, yes 100%. here's a quote from the actual paper

> Although the high viral load we observed in asymptomatic patients raises a distinct possibility of a risk for transmission, our study was not designed to determine this

(you'll note at nowhere in the paper is there anything resembling 100% spread in asymptomatic compared to symptomatic...this number is purely fabricated from thin air)

another citation from that paper is a citation to char et. al. that says the paper claims 40-140% infectiousness for asymptomatic individuals...again let's read the actual paper they cite

here's a quote from the paper

> In the household setting, symptomatic case-patients had 2.7 times the risk of transmitting SARS-CoV-2 to their close contacts, compared with asymptomatic and presymptomatic case-patients

so the above paper deals with household settings and finds roughly 1/3 in a household setting...this paper very generously makes up numbers again to cite to this paper...embarrassing.

the cite mc evoy et. al. as having a finding of 40-70% which they got right! horray!

so 2/3 papers they use to determine their asymptomatic infectious number for their modeling are just garbage citations that don't resemble the findings of the source paper at all

this paper is worse than useless.

again, their model sets the infectiousness rate of asymptomatic individuals based on 3 citations - 2 of which are fabricated...garbage...utter garbage.

Are people who have died in car accidents counted as COVID-19 deaths?

ANSWER:

No. There is a two-level system in place to make sure death counts are accurate.

www.wusa9.com/amp/article/news/verify/covid-deaths-car-crash-comorbidities-coronavirus-death-total-counts-john-hopkins-study/65-e3842ed2-f753-4a15-8b97-c2ae75c2b2ce

either way the context of the conversation is about early trends so my point still stands and is validated by the article you've linked, even.

Early trends showed severe undercounting when later compared to excess mortality, probably due to low testing capacity at the start. See here for some more information on the undercounting: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-...

You’ll have to point out in the previous article where it agrees with your point on car crashes counted as covid deaths, it does not show this in the version of the article that is presented to me.

If anything I would use that as an argument to show lockdowns may very well be doing substantial harm and causing massive death.

This hypothesis is further supported by the fact that not a single country in the top 30 excess mortality during the pandemic is a country that avoided stringent lockdowns.

Correlation != causation of course, but it's a logical thought to investigate and there's plenty more evidence towards lockdown's doing more harm than good (considering the evidence they prevented spread at all is lacking)

as for your request - I never said the article agrees with my point about car crashes counted as covid deaths, I said it agrees with me that the correction happens later.

I also don’t understand the “evidence they prevented spread at all is lacking” line. We now have multiple waves in multiple countries. My country (Scotland) specifically has peaks in infections that are then followed by falls as a result of lockdowns. In fact we are now seeing infections rise as we ease restrictions again. These falls go against normal seasonal behaviours for respiratory illnesses, so it’s clear that something else is causing the fall - the lockdown!

The fact that a virus needs contact with people to spread is literally virus 101, and therefore limiting contact suppresses transmission - how do you come to the conclusion that this is not the case?

Lockdowns don't limit transmission because, in the US, only 40% of the economy shut down and traveling metrics didn't go down for very long. It's not that social distancing can't work - it's that it didn't work for likely very complex reasons.