lots of people with no clinical qualifications, training and experience yesterday trying to "splain" to me that what we *think* is Covid-19 in acute care is just normal seasonal respiratory viruses we'd see at any time of the year, with a "false positive" test thrown in.
Nope

those of us who have been through many many busy autumn and winter periods and overcrowding/bed pressures and big surges of other seasonal infections and who saw lots of sick people with Covid in the Spring recognise (sometimes overlapping) but v different patterns/picture

those symptoms & investigations and illness course all pretty well described by observational studies now. There is a separate issue of people who don't look "classically" Covid-y but still turn out to have it because presenting with non-respiratory symptoms e.g. delirium/GI

but steaming into twitter arguments with people who do this stuff for a living day in day out and have seen how sick people can get with Covid including own colleagues and trying to school them on their own job is as breath taking as the virus itself can be

allied to this is the kind of people yesterday and over the weekend is people telling someone like me (who knows daily what the activity through A&E is over past 24 hours, how many beds are available/closed) to "open your eyes" and "stop lying" "you know the hospitals are empty"

imagine someone who has never set foot in a prison saying to inmate/officer "look - you KNOW they are cushy holiday camps. You KNOW there's no violence or drugs. you KNOW the riots are all fake news & no inmates have mental health problems" Open your eyes!" "Admit it!"

Twitter