That doesn’t look good. However, it could be less bad than it looks because of their matching criteria (Supplementary Table 1) not really assessing the severity of different types of prior health issues but their existence only (probably because that is what they had access to for such a large sample), e.g. “history of diabetes: Yes/No”.
I think that a latent health status with a high probability of having complications (leading to a hospital stay) if contracting COVID-19 is also linked to a higher probability of a hospital stay or death in the following months even without contracting COVID-19. Hard to tell how much one should correct down the results of the study for deaths and hospital admissions based on that (but I believe there still remains a substantial negative long term impact by the infection with COVID-19).
That doesn’t look good. However, it could be less bad than it looks because of their matching criteria (Supplementary Table 1) not really assessing the severity of different types of prior health issues but their existence only (probably because that is what they had access to for such a large sample), e.g. “history of diabetes: Yes/No”.
I think that a latent health status with a high probability of having complications (leading to a hospital stay) if contracting COVID-19 is also linked to a higher probability of a hospital stay or death in the following months even without contracting COVID-19. Hard to tell how much one should correct down the results of the study for deaths and hospital admissions based on that (but I believe there still remains a substantial negative long term impact by the infection with COVID-19).