COVID Uncovered (part 1)

Lessons from an undisclosed NHS Trust

In the film Love Actually some of the action takes place in an art gallery that is exhibiting 'Christmas Uncovered', being a series of larger than life B&W male nudes with bright red Santa hats covering nipples.

Yesterday I ran a post called Valentine’s Day Treat in which I presented a breakdown of 3,948 COVID admissions to the emergency department of a sizeable NHS Trust for the period Jan – Sep ’21 so we could see how the positive test results were stacking up against chief complaint and diagnoses made. This morning I am going to give this analysis a little more love, as they say, by considering significant non-respiratory morbidity; that is to say contenders for other states of ill-health severe enough to warrant admission for emergency care in their own right.

For this exercise I elected to divide diagnoses into the primary categories of cardiac, cancer, CNS, sepsis/organ failure and physical trauma. Examples within each category are cardiogenic shock, multiple myeloma, tonic-clonic…