"An internal database from two suburban Chicago hospitals reveals the bias; for health authorities, this skew is a feature, not a bug.
An internal database from a Chicago-area medical system offers new evidence hospitals are inflating how many unvaccinated people are hospitalized for Covid.
Many patients listed as having “unknown” Covid vaccination status and grouped with the unvaccinated are actually Covid-jabbed, the database suggests.
The system, which includes two medium-sized suburban hospitals west of Chicago, itself acknowledges in the database that it overestimates the number of unvaccinated patients - though it does not know by how much.
This error may sound minor and technical. In fact, it is crucial.
Knowing how many patients are vaccinated and how many are not is the first step in figuring out if mRNA shots reduce hospitalizations from Covid.
If hospitals are systematically misclassifying vaccinated patients as unjabbed, the endlessly repeated claim that unvaccinated people are at much higher risk of being hospitalized from Covid becomes impossible to trust, much less verify.
Covid vaccine skeptics have pointed out this potential flaw before.
But figures from the hospital system - called Edward-Elmhurst Health - offer new and powerful evidence it is real, from an unexpected direction.
In an internal dashboard, Edward-Elmhurst includes Covid vaccination figures not just for Covid patients but for all patients. (Last year, Edward-Elmhurst merged with an even larger Illinois hospital system, but this database does not include the other hospitals. A hospital employee with access to it provided screenshots from it as well as proof of employment.)
Hospitals should have no incentive to misclassify vaccination status for non-Covid patients. And as long as Covid vaccinations don’t change the odds someone is hospitalized for non-Covid illnesses, inpatient trends should reflect vaccination levels in the broader population around the hospital.
The two Edward-Elmhurst hospitals are located about 30 miles west of downtown Chicago, in suburban DuPage County. Even by blue-state standards, DuPage is very highly vaccinated against Covid. According to the Illinois Department of Public Health, 98.5 percent of adults over 65 in DuPage have received two or more Covid vaccine doses.
Put another way, only 1.5 percent of country residents over 65 are unvaccinated."
