What Was COVID-19, Exactly? (part 3)

I investigate a cohort of 6,865 adult in-hospital deaths for two sample periods with high disease prevalence using split file, staged multivariate logistic regression

In part 1 of this series I presented a summary table of Pearson bivariate correlations revealing a correspondence between case detection rate (CDR - cases per 100 viral tests) and a whole bunch of diagnostic groupings from cancer to cardiac and back for 21,810 adult in-hospital deaths. If we presume that the PCR was detecting something then whatever that something was appeared to be associated with every medical condition you could think of, and I deemed this to be rather peculiar. A great deal of this malarkey will come about through comorbidity but we might expect a greater degree of differentiation than appears.

These correlations were made on aggregate data (weekly counts) so I thought it prudent to grab the individual case data and have a look at that. After a spot of cogitation I decided to whip out the trusty spanner of staged multivariate logistic regression and set the COVID diagnosis as given in the EPR as the dependent variable. In order to minimise the likelihood of false p…