Emergency Department Admissions: Analysis of CDS Dataset (part 7)

I analyse an anonymised data dump of 1.9 million admissions records to the emergency departments of an undisclosed NHS Trust for the period June 2017 – September 2021

What I’d like to do in these next two episodes is examine time series data for a variety of variables to get a feel for what the pandemic was and was not in relation to the historic case profile. Thus I shall be looking at the whole dataset of 1,928,918 admissions for the period January 2017 – September 2021 but on a weekly basis to avoid scraping the barrel with counts.

Age At Admission

I’m going to start with mean age at admission:

The giant leap for mankind around 2020/w13 (week ending 27 March) is intriguing. We have a sudden rush of older folk rather than a steady build we’d expect from the gradual spread of a novel and deadly virus, which points the finger at policy. It’s worth asking if these folk were arriving fresh from home or being ferried from care, residential and nursing homes where things were getting out of hand. And I don’t mean honest-to-goodness SARS-COV-2 infection neither. Also worthy of note is the steady ramp from 2017 onward, which is to be expected with an ageing…