COVID uncovered (part 6)

Development of a case severity index score using bed occupancy data

Back in parts 1 - 5 of this series I squeezed some juice out of an anonymised data dump I had been given for emergency department admissions and in-hospital deaths for an undisclosed NHS Trust. This dump covered the period up to Sep ’21 and so I decided to return to the UK GOV coronavirus dashboard/NHS England Hospitals Activity pages to see if I could squeeze a bit of fresher juice out of these.

I hit upon two ideas, the first being to plot out COVID occupancy of mechanical ventilation (MV) beds against COVID occupancy of general beds and colour code this for each quarter period to get a handle on the overall dynamic; the second being to compare the ratio of MV bed use to general bed use for COVID and non-COVID inpatients.

First idea…

This is well funky and possibly to most colourful slide I have produced to date. During the first wave of 2020/Q2 (red blobs) we see a reasonably linear relationship between COVID MV bed occupancy and COVID general bed occupancy, as we may expect. 2020/Q3 …