Tracking hospital virus patients can be ‘very difficult’
Establishing whether patients being admitted to hospitals across Scotland are free from Covid-19 remains “very difficult,” Scotland’s health secretary has admitted.
Jeane Freeman said even if new admissions tested negative for the virus, they could still be incubating it.
She said the Scottish Government could not yet tell how many people had contracted the virus in hospital settings, but stressed it was working with its partners to secure the data. Speaking at topical questions in Holyrood yesterday, Ms Freeman said the prolonged incubation period of Covid-19, which can last for up to 14 days, meant that “it is not possible to be certain exactly how many people have contracted the disease after admission to hospital”.
She said: “The Scottish Government is working with UK counterparts and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control to establish international definitions for hospital acquired Covid-19 infections.
“We will reach those definitions and publish information about the data collected in NHS boards against those definitions in the coming weeks.”
Scottish Labour’s health spokeswoman Monica Lennon said it was vital that “robust and reliable” data was in the public domain. She pointed to an outbreak of Covid-19 in Gartnavel Hospital in Glasgow, highlighting the death of David Holgate, a 91-year-old who tested negative for the virus on admission, only to die of it last month.
Ms Freeman expressed her condolences to those families who had lost loved ones, but stressed it was “very difficult to know” if new patients risked spreading the virus to others.
“They test negative at the point when they are tested, that does not mean that they are not incubating Covid-19,” she explained. “The 14-day incubation period does make it difficult to be absolutely certain in these matters.
“[Health] boards and hospitals should have very clear infection prevention and control procedures, and Ms Lennon is absolutely right, this is a very serious matter, and we need to understand as best we can what more it is we need to do in hospital settings to minimise the transmission of Covid-19.”
Ms Lennon pointed out that given hundreds of patients, including those who were untested, were discharged into care homes, and asked what steps were being taken to trace those who were in hospitals where outbreaks occurred.
Ms Freeman said Public Health Scotland was working to bring together testing and discharge datasets. She said once the comparable data was deemed to be robust, it would be published on an ongoing basis.