NHSUK: Emergency Admissions by vaccination & COVID status
Just before my break from analysis I prepped a rather large file of emergency admission EPR data for an undisclosed UK NHS Trust covering the period Jan – Sep 2021. There’s all manner of detailed analysis that can pop out of this so I cogitated on what slides people would likely want to see first and foremost. I decided to address the issue of vaccinated vs. unvaccinated emergency COVID admissions.
My definition of vaccinated is pretty simple – vaccinated means you are jabbed with at least one dose at any time prior to admission, including being jabbed earlier the same day. This refreshing approach to data analysis is what can be achieved when you have access to the EPR; that is to say you can avoid all that fudge and funny business. I can also develop the analysis to look at first vs. second dosing but this is like analysis of a dog chasing its tail; everyone was led to believe the first dose would do something beneficial, then it was after the second dose, now it is after the third dose they’re calling a ‘booster’ for some obscure reason. Perhaps the fourth dose will be called a ‘top up’, and I would suggest the fifth dose be called a ‘tickler’. Perhaps it would be easier to call them ‘immunity credits’ and hand out bingo scratch cards at the same time.
My definition of COVID is pretty simple – having ‘COVID’ means the admissions team coded you as a COVID case whether or not you were symptomatic and whether or not you were being rushed to hospital for anything remotely related e.g. pregnancy and/or dropping a spanner on your foot i.e. we’re talking a positive test result and that’s about it. I wish I’d bought shares at the outset. My definition of symptomatic is also pretty simple – being ‘symptomatic’ means admission with a positive test result and an acute respiratory condition. ‘Asymptomatic’ covers all those going to hospital for all the usual reasons but who test positive for some reason.
So there you have it, a brace of slides that reveals what is actually going on. There’s a curious blue bump in vaccinated symptomatic COVID admissions back in spring of 2021 and then it settles down to much of a muchness until the red bump in unvaccinated symptomatic COVID admissions around weeks 29 & 30. A flash in the pan that is altogether rather curious. Is this a short-lived viral variant I see before me or something else altogether? A more important question, perhaps, is why we aren’t seeing a massive benefit for the vaccinated folk in symptomatic COVID admission several months in to the grand experiment.
The second slide reveals the game. Here we have all those asymptomatic cases with spannered toes and whatnot being labelled as COVID admissions on the basis of a single positive test result. It looks to me like we had a terrible variant raging across the population that was causing people to drop spanners more often.
