Posted by: suzan | Nov 11 2022 17:22 utc | 67
“the pre-print arguing there is evidence to show that reinfections increase the incidence of bad health outcomes has passed peer review and has been published”
The conclusions the authors of the study reach are extremely suspect. Their conclusions are questionable because the data is clearly bogus.
The data shows that less than 10% of the total population became infected and of that subset less than 10% became infected again. So the “bad health outcomes” they observed happened to less than 1% of the population studied while 5 million other people in the VA health VA data base did not have these “bad outcomes”. The obvious problem with this is that we all know that the 40k people they detected as having covid reinfection were mostly those admitted to VA hospitals (because they were sick) and the others (5 million that they count as never infected) were never so sick that they were detected as having covid. The only reasonable conclusion from that data is the people with poor health are much more likely to end up in the hospital (a fact we already knew).
Here are some of the questionable statements contained in the study:
“People with a reinfection also had an increased risk of hospitalization.”
Well, duh, hospitalization is how most of those reinfections became known to the VA hospitals. What about the reinfections that were mild and undetected? One can’t say whether they are at increased risk of hospitalization.
“The study has several limitations. The cohorts of people with one, two, three or more infections included those that had a positive test for SARS-CoV-2 and did not include those who may have had an infection with SARS-CoV-2 but were not tested; this may have resulted in misclassification of exposure since these people would have been enrolled in the control groups.”
No shit sherlock. Looking at general infection rates at the time of this study the majority of infected persons in this data base were “misclassified”.
It goes on to say about these obvious missclasifications:
“If present in large numbers and if their true risk of adverse health outcomes is substantially higher than the noninfected controls, then this may have resulted in underestimation of the risks of reinfection.”
What they did there was use the conclusion they reached from what even they admit is bogus data to tell you what the findings would be if they would have had good data. That is ridiculous.
We have already known from the beginning that a small percent of the population that is in poor health are the most likely to become severely ill, but what about the other 99+% that some number may get covid but don’t get counted? How can they conclude anything at all about what increased or decreased risks of those in the VA data base whose infection was never recorded – especially when it is likely that the unrecorded infections outnumber the recorded ones.

Posted by: jinn | Nov 16 2022 15:06 utc | 101