COVID-19 Hospitalizations: Reality Check
Corey's Digs
Nov 24, 2020

[snip]

Televisions, computers, radios, and cell phones are blowing up with the media sounding the alarm: “hospitals are reaching full capacity!” while governors slide back into their authoritarian lockdowns. Back in March we heard the same panic-stricken message and were flooded with images of people lined up to get into hospitals, shortages of beds and ventilators, freezer trucks lining the allies, graves being dug, and hospital ships swimming their way to the coasts of New York and California.

Yet, by April 21, the Comfort ship was leaving the port from New York because Governor Cuomo said he didn’t need it. Corey’s Digs reported on Inside The Hospitals & Why The Lockdown back in April to show the reality of the situation at that time, and now we have nearly 10 months of data accumulated, and it paints quite a picture.

A Dose of Reality: Don’t Let The Numbers Fool You

Some hard numbers:

• Total number of hospitals in the US: 6,146

• Total number of staffed beds in all US hospitals: 924,107

• The total number of Covid-positive hospitalizations on November 17 in the entire US: 76,958

• Throughout all of 2020, since Covid hit, the US never exceeded 60k hospitalizations on any given day, until November 10th.

• Patients in hospitals for other reasons are counted as Covid hospitalizations if they test positive

• March 31 total cumulative Covid-positive hospitalizations in the US: 23,725

• April 30 total cumulative Covid-positive hospitalizations in the US: 123,786

• July 31 total cumulative Covid-positive hospitalizations in the US: 308,088

• September 30 total cumulative Covid-positive hospitalizations in the US: 408,649

• November 17 total cumulative Covid-positive hospitalizations in the US: 517,471

Does 517,471 hospitalizations for the entire year sound alarming? How about after we remove the fact that over 70% of them recovered? How about after we’ve assessed their actual cause of death since the CDC has stated that only 6% of death certificates indicate that people died from Covid, and the remaining 94% have on average 2.6 comorbidities? For starters, 49.49% of all Covid-related deaths included pneumonia. Not to mention, 1 in every 4 deaths in the US are due to heart disease, and 40% of all Covid-related deaths took place in hospice, long-term care facilities, and nursing homes due to other causes.

In 2018, there were 36,251,159 people admitted to hospitals across the US.