COVID Uncovered (part 2)

Lessons from an undisclosed NHS Trust

In COVID Uncovered part 1 we took a look at admissions to the emergency department for a sizeable NHS Trust over the period Jan – Sep ’21 broken down by audited COVID status. We arrived at an audited status by considering all diagnoses made during triage along with presentation (a.k.a. chief complaint) and this enabled us to distinguish between asymptomatic COVID, mild COVID and various forms of severe COVID illness with or without significant comorbidities. Some 3,948 COVID admissions boiled down to just 129 cases that could be ascribed to severe COVID and severe COVID alone, this being a drop in the ocean of 296,331 admissions (0.04%). Folk are asking what the fuss was about. Quite.

This morning I thought I ought to apply the same diagnostic methodology to in-hospital deaths registered over the period Feb ‘20 – Sep ’21 for the same undisclosed Trust. In the first table below we observe a total of 20,987 deaths over the course of the pandemic, 83.6% of which were not associated with a…