Updated charts by Dave Dixon on hospital use. When you look at this, keep firmly in mind that at this point at least 25% and possibly as many as 50% of these hospital beds that are listed as being used by CV-19 patients are not for that purpose, they are for patients admitted for another reason who happened to test positive. And note the drop in ICU beds; these are expensive to maintain and hospitals try to always run as cross to full capacity as they can, and right now because of vaccine mandates, hospitals are having trouble maintaining staff for beds. Stupid, stupid, stupid policies.
I have been looking at the MA Covid dashboard and I am getting a bit annoyed at the way they are presenting the data. (https://www.mass.gov/info-details/covid-19-response-reporting#covid-19-interactive-data-dashboard-) if you select ‘Hospitalizations’ from the left nav, the first tab that is brought up states there are 704 patients hospitialized for COVID19 as of Sept 16. I like that and it tells us how many were vaccinated, I like it so far. The next tab is ‘ICU & Intubation’ again it seems pretty straight forward and they reference COVID patients. The third tab ‘Patient Demographics’ seems ok, these are COVID patients.
Then you get to the fourth and final tab “Bed Occupancy” and things start to get a bit weird and even scary. This tab indicates that 92% of the medical/surgical beds and 80% of ICU beds are occupied….but they are not clear as to what types of patients occupy those beds. I cannot believe that 704 patients state wide are pushing that occupancy number so high.
I looked at the Department of Health and Human Services stats for MA and there is some discrepancies but I think it is understandable and likely due to reporting lag, but even with that lag they are reporting 646 inpatients for COVID19 the reporting dates are 4 days apart so I am not alarmed at the discrepancy.
What is interesting is that HHS indicates 3.44% of inpatient beds are in use for COVID19, and 85.51% of inpatient beds are in use. Compare that to the MA Dashboard where they indicate that 92% of inpatient beds are in use but they fail to call out the percent are associated with COVID19. Doesn’t this seem misleading that the intent is to freak people out about COVID specifically?
So are hospitals full…yeah it looks like it. Is it due to COVID? Doesn’t look like it to me. Am I crazy?
You are not crazy, most of the states and the feds are trying to highlight and report things in a way that looks like CV-19 is overwhelming hospitals, it isn’t.