Emergency Department Admissions: Analysis of ECDS Dataset (part 2)

Further analysis of an ECDS data dump of 237k adult admissions records to the emergency departments of an undisclosed UK NHS Trust: the COVID question (continued)

I left off in part 1 of this series with the promise of adjusting my net. Since it is possible to debate the treatment matrix until the (taxed) cows come home I decided to narrow the shortlist down to those 7 procedures that were very much respiratory orientated, these being:

• Drainage of pleural cavity

• Insertion of endotracheal tube

• Insertion of pleural tube drain

• Nasopharyngeal airway insertion

• Nebuliser therapy

• Noninvasive ventilation

• Oxygen therapy

The resulting cross-tabulation against COVID symptomatic status now looks like this:

There’s an improvement for sure, with 10.9% of asymptomatic COVID cases receiving a respiratory procedure compared to 17.9% for symptomatic COVID but I’m still puzzled as to what might have been going on. Could it be that the tag of a positive test result took those 68 ED admissions down a different (and unnecessary) pathway? And how about that seemingly low critical treatment rate of 17.9% for those 2,874 symptomatic COVID cases? If we’re talking genuinely novel…