Hospital Covid case numbers ‘misleading’
MPS raise questions as NHS finds quarter of virus patients had other cause of admission
ONE in four patients classed as a “Covid hospitalisation” is actually being treated for other reasons, official data reveal, prompting claims that the public has been misled.
The NHS national stocktake has established for the first time how many people categorised as coronavirus cases had an alternative primary cause to be admitted.
Of 5,021 patients classed as hospitalised by Covid this week, 1,166 were under treatment for other reasons.
Tory MPS last night accused the Government of making “flawed decisions based on misleading data”, with leading scientists questioning why the true picture was only beginning to emerge now.
Since March last year, the NHS has published daily statistics on the number of Covid hospitalisations and the total number of patients in hospital with the virus. The data have regularly been referred to by ministers and at Downing Street briefings, with the need to “Protect the NHS” key to government messages in the first lockdown, and hospital pressures frequently cited as a reason to retain restrictions.
Every person admitted to hospital is routinely tested for Covid. The hospitalisation statistics include every person found to be positive during their stay or in the 14 days before admission.
As a result, those in hospital for entirely different reasons, such as a broken leg, who might otherwise never have known that they had picked up the virus, are counted in the statistics along with those suffering severe illness owing to Covid. But in the run-up to “freedom day” this month, hospitals were instructed to provide further data, distinguishing between admissions which were primarily caused by Covid, and those which are not.
Hospitals were instructed to provide “a breakdown of the current stock of Covid patients into those in hospital with acute Covid-19 symptoms (and for whom Covid-19 is the primary reason for being in hospital); and those who are primarily in hospital for a reason other than Covid-19”.
Prof Keith Willett, NHS England’s Covid incident director, said: “In lay terms this could be considered as a binary split between those in hospital ‘for Covid-19’ and those in hospital ‘with Covid-19’.”
The resulting figures, issued by NHS England last night, prompted suggestions that previous decisions to restrict freedoms were based on inflated statistics. The disclosures will also put officials under pressure to revise previous data on Covid hospitalisations and in future to use “primary” diagnosis with Covid as the key daily statistic.
The breakdown only started being calculated on June 18, when the 1,154 Covid hospitalisations were recorded, of which just 882 have now been given a primary diagnosis of Covid. The split has remained constant since.
As of July 27, 5,021 beds were occupied by patients with Covid. Of those, 3,855, just over three quarters of the total, were classed as “primarily Covid” cases. In some areas, almost one in three Covid hospitalisations were actually admitted for other reasons.
Of 444 Covid cases in the South East on July 27, 304 were classed as primarily Covid. There was a similar trend in the Midlands, with 641 of 927 hospitalisations classed as primarily
Covid. Health officials stressed that some cases classed as “primarily noncovid” could include those where the virus was a significant factor, such as a patient whose primary diagnosis was a stroke, but where Covid could have increased the risk of it.
Prof Carl Heneghan, the director of the Centre for Evidence-based Medicine at the University of Oxford, said: “This is information we should have had a very long time ago. We have been crying out for it for nearly 18 months.
“The Government might have made very different decisions about restrictions if it had access to data which actually measured the situation accurately.”
Sir Iain Duncan Smith, the former Tory leader, said: “What we are beginning to discover is that the nature of the data collection has been really poor.
“This in turn means that ministers who have to make very big decisions are too often sitting on misleading data, which often leads to flawed decisionmaking.”
Sir Graham Brady, the chairman of the 1922 Committee of Tory backbench MPS, said it was “frustrating and ridiculous that this was not available months and months ago”.
Health officials said all patients with Covid required treatment in areas that are segregated from patients without Covid, while the presence of Covid could increase risks from other illnesses.
A Department of Health and Social Care spokesman said: “The Health Secretary asked for this data to help us better understand the impact of the vaccine programme on stopping people infected with Covid requiring hospital treatment.
“The total number of patients with Covid – whether that is primarily what they are being treated for or not – remains a crucial indicator of pressure on the NHS since all those patients require careful infection control including quarantining and PPE.”
Separate data from Public Health England suggests Covid vaccines have prevented an estimated 22 million infections, 60,000 deaths and more than 52,600 hospital admissions.