Hospitalisation Rate For Adult Respiratory Conditions (part 6)

Lessons from an undisclosed NHS Trust

So far in this series we have seen a great deal that doesn’t make sense in terms of the global pandemic narrative. We would surely expect infection with SARS-COV-2 to feature strongly in the hospitalisation rate of adult respiratory admissions but it doesn’t; neither was 2020 particularly different from 2017 and 2019 in this regard.

This morning I thought I’d take a closer look at this apparent decoupling of global narrative and observation at the sharp end by calculating the hospitalisation ratio for adult respiratory admissions. This is simply the weekly number of hospitalised cases divided by the weekly number of discharges. When the hospitalised case count equals the discharged case count then this ratio will have a value of 1.00. If there are 400 hospitalised cases and 200 discharges this ratio will have a value of 2.00; thus if there are 200 hospitalised cases and 400 discharges this ratio will have a value of 0.50. Simples!

Let us now plot this ratio out for Jan 2019 – Sep 2021, mark the all-important central value of 1.00 then add in the official COVID-19 case count for England as derived from the UK GOV coronavirus dashboard. What I am looking for here is a rough correlation between the COVID-19 case count and the hospitalisation ratio. This can only be a rough correlation because of time delays, but nevertheless there should be one. Except there isn’t!

There’s a convincing rise in the ratio corresponding to the first wave in spring 2020, but we don’t see a kick upward for the second wave, third wave or fourth wave. Instead, the ratio settles at a value of around  1.10 until late spring 2021 when it dips below the glowing blue unity line to stay there. The way I’m interpreting this is that there is a general rate (need) of hospitalisation for adult respiratory cases during this whole period that it is independent of fluctuating COVID case counts. One way to put it is that COVID case counts don’t matter when it comes to the crunch.

So is that big blue hump indicative of a rather deadly SARS-COV-2 infection? Not if we look at the hospitalisation ratio for 2019, which reaches the same level for most of the year. What this means is the need for hospitalisation of adult respiratory cases during the pandemic isn’t any greater than the need we may witness in earlier years. In this regard the novel SARS-COV-2 virus is acting like any other coronavirus and we ought to start questioning what ‘novel’ really means.