NiteHawk said "The statistics are just that. You can interpret them anyway you see fit, that is a part of critical thinking. The numbers though, are not misleading, they are only numbers. You can debate the deductions made from said numbers, but the numbers are real. It can be misleading however, if you don't account for the number in hospital listed as covid but aren't being treated as such.
If one were to simply post the total number of hospitalizations with covid, it would be misleading.
In my post above it shows that 51% of admissions in NYC were admitted with covid and not because of it. This is solid, confirmed data.
In the thread Quebec Health Restrictions you quoted a twitter post as follows:
"Craig Spencer MD MPH
@Craig_A_Spencer
Replying to @Craig_A_Spencer
But still so many needed hospitalization.
Right now NYC has over 5,000 Covid hospitalizations.
More than last winter’s peak.
Higher than any point since May 2020.
3 times higher than only two weeks ago.
And still climbing higher everyday."
I would suggest that 5,000 hospitalizations is in fact misleading. Using the Governors numbers, less than half were admitted due to Covid. More than half were admitted with covid for other reasons. To use 5000 as a justification to make your point is at the least misleading.
I agree you can make a case for overrunning our health system using all the facts at hand, so why omit certain ones, or berate the people that report them? I would think that you would appreciate posters giving real figures instead of simply assumptions or opinions.
1 covid case is 1 too many. I advocate all Health guidelines, but lets give your readers all the facts and not just some.
Stay safe!!! "
No berating here, sorry if you've taken it that way. Suggest that largely two kinds of people show up in these kinds of situations. People that are trying to minimize what we're facing as part of a longer-running effort of many months to undercut the Public Health response to a serious threat and/or justify disregarding Public Health advice on the importance of vaccines and measures in place to get us through this... and people just looking for reasons to hope in the middle of a public health emergency. You sound closer to the second type, but there are too many Type 1's spreading misleading info that are looking for red meat to cherry pick from and for that reason it's important to have these discussions and sometimes they will have a firmer tone.
Think we can both agree that we wish we had the Manitoba data, but when you have data for the whole state of New York at your fingertips broken down by region I’d suggest that plucking just big ole New York City out of it as a representation of Manitoba is the extreme example.
If you take the state average of 57% admitted in the state for Covid-specific reasons initially, in Manitoba out of our 297 hospitalizations and 257 active hospitalizations that would still translate to 169 hospitalizations and 146 active hospitalizations from Covid-related admissions … both above either number here in the lead-up to Omicron when Delta was said to already have our medical system in a dangerous place. The active number in particular is well-above.
Some might disagree, but since the data is available in your chart I’d personally feel more comfortable about the whole state ex-NYC which still has a population that dwarfs us and is at least a little closer to representing our cross-section of urban and rural (but even then still not ideal). In that case it’s interestingly enough 66% or ~ 2/3 of cases that are hospitalized specifically for Covid ex-NYC. That applied here would have 196 hospitalizations and 169 active hospitalizations admitted specifically for Covid.
Obviously those aren’t going to be our numbers and depending on region there could be different factors at play such as interplay with Delta cases, but point is that anyone using the because/with talking point as part of minimizing what’s being faced is applying something that doesn't do a lot to change in this particular province to the fact that we're in a serious and still seemingly worsening situation where our numbers are large enough that you could literally cut them in half and still have us in a bad place.
Then consider that even during Delta and prev waves there will have been some because/with split in case numbers that were already part of a serious situation. Then consider that we can’t just write off admissions that weren’t initially Covid-related as non-impactful on the medical system (someone working in the system could probably give a better idea how they still have to handle someone that for example comes in with a broken leg that also tests positive for Covid that was less if at all symptomatic). Then consider that numbers are still rising and not falling and I understand why any of the Manitoba doctors that I’ve seen posting on Twitter have had a pretty universal tone of concern for weeks for the direction we’ve been heading and concern that we haven’t had more restrictions in place to better try to slow things down.
Either way, think we can also agree that lets get the total Manitoba hosptalized number, the total Manitoba hospital capacity number, ideally broken down by region on a daily basis and then these kinds of discussions can have most objective framework possible to see where we are and where we're headed.