US hospitals seeing different kind of COVID surge this time

This story presents some startling data regarding Omicron and related hospitalization, and it raises a lot of questions.

... a surprising share of patients — two-thirds in some places — are testing positive while in the hospital for other reasons.

This is astonishing. So the majority of people being diagnosed with covid at hospitals went to the hospital for different reasons, presumably not even aware they had covid. One question is, are they now being counted as hospitalized covid patients?

..hospitals say the patients aren’t as sick as those who came in during the last surge. Intensive care units aren’t as full, and ventilators aren’t needed as much as they were before.

Clearly they're not as sick. Most of them didn't even know they were sick, which means they aren't sick!

...the hospitalization numbers do not tell the whole story. Some cases in the official count involve COVID-19 infections that weren’t what put the patients in the hospital in the first place.

Noted above. Not just 'some' cases, but the majority of cases. This quote seems to suggest that people who go to the hospital for a reason other than covid, and are then hospitalized, are considered hospitalized covid patience. If this is so, it's a serious misrepresentation of data.

Dr. Fritz François, chief of hospital operations at NYU Langone Health in New York City, said about 65% of patients admitted to that system with COVID-19 recently were primarily hospitalized for something else and were incidentally found to have the virus.

Again, same story. The majority of people being hospitalized, who happen to have covid, weren't sick. That means the vast majority of people who have covid don't have symptoms. That means it's not make most of us sick.

At two large Seattle hospitals over the past two weeks, three-quarters of the 64 patients testing positive for the coronavirus were admitted with a primary diagnosis other than COVID-19.

Again.

In Connecticut, many ER patients are in beds in hallways, and nurses are often working double shifts because of staffing shortages, said Sherri Dayton, a nurse at the Backus Plainfield Emergency Care Center. Many emergency rooms have hours-long waiting times, she said.

Here's the rub. When these health care workers test positive for covid (that's not making them sick) they have to stay home, and this is causing people who really are sick with things like heart failure, diabetes, stroke, etc., miss out on treatment.

This is an absurd situation. Our hospitals are failing the public not because of covid, but because of covid policy. As teachers, we all know that we go to work ALL THE TIME with a runny nose, or even much worse. We wouldn't think of staying at home because we have a virus that isn't making us sick. This is what's happening in health care. No doubt doctors and nurses get tested regularly, perhaps even daily, and when they show positive, they have to stay home, even if they feel great. This is resulting in people who really need treatment for other things not getting it. Crazy.