Almost 30 months into the COVID-19 pandemic, there is still not an agreed national system for counting key metrics such as hospital occupancy.
It defies belief that almost 30 months into the COVID-19 pandemic, we still don’t have an agreed national measure of the key metrics used to understand the impact of the disease.
COVID hospital patients are counted differently in Victoria, making national comparisons problematic.But rather than publish daily numbers showing the number of beds occupied by COVID patients as a ratio of all hospital beds, every state and territory is instead publishing raw admission numbers. In some states, these numbers include hospital-at-home admissions, but in others not.
In other states, a person in hospital with COVID-19 is counted as a COVID patient for 14 days, regardless of whether they still test positive.That is why Victoria seemingly has a COVID hospitalisation rate about half that of NSW. In NSW, where authorities predict hospital rates during this winter wave will reach similar levels to those during the January wave, authorities changed the hospitalisation measure in February to bring NSW into line with other states .This means the January peak of 2943 people in hospital with COVID-19 used a different definition of “hospitalised with COVID” compared with the current wave.
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