Hospitals have been told to change the way they collect
data on patients infected with
coronavirus to differentiate between those actually sick with symptoms and those who test positive while seeking treatment for something else.
The move would reduce the overall number of patients in hospital for coronavirus as until now data from hospitals has included all patients who tested positive for
Covid-19 regardless of whether they had symptoms or not.
NHS England has instructed hospitals to make the change to the daily flow of data sent by NHS trusts and told
The Independent the move was being done to help analyse the effect of the vaccine programme and whether it was successfully reducing Covid-19 sickness.
It has not yet committed to publishing the data but the change could prove crucial to the government’s decision to end lockdown on 21 June.
In a letter to hospital bosses on 7 June, shared with
The Independent, NHS England’s Covid incident director Professor Keith Willett said from now on NHS England wanted a “a breakdown of the current stock of Covid patients into those who are in hospital with acute Covid-19 symptoms (and for whom Covid-19 is the primary reason for being in hospital); and those who are primarily in hospital for a reason other than Covid-19 (but for whom the hospital is having to manage and treat the Covid-19 symptoms alongside their primary condition).”
He added: “In lay terms this could be considered as a binary split between those in hospital ‘for Covid-19’ and those in hospital ‘with Covid-19’. We are asking for this binary split for those patients newly admitted to hospital and those newly diagnosed with Covid while in hospital.”
During the coronavirus crisis many patients in hospital were sick from the virus with intensive care units forced to double or triple their capacity and the vast majority of patients needing oxygen.
It has always been the case that as the virus spreads in the community some patients would likely test positive.
One NHS source said the new data would be “more realistic” as not all patients were sick with the virus, adding: “But it will make figures look better as there have always been some, for example stroke [patients], who also had Covid as an incidental finding”.
One clinician said: “As the community prevalence goes up, the in-hospital rate will go up in line with that. But if a proportion of that younger cohort are in hospital for other reasons, then the story is completely different. This change will give a much better view of this.”
NHS England data on hospital admissions is published daily at a regional level and several days later on the government’s dashboard. An internal daily dashboard of Covid data tracks infections across hospitals but is not made public.
A spokesperson for NHS England said: “Throughout the pandemic, the NHS has published daily, weekly, monthly and up-to-date information on Covid hospital activity, and this is a further update for operational reasons as it is obviously important for the NHS to continue to monitor cases of covid in hospitals, alongside the success and impact of the vaccine programme.”
They added that the data was used for planning and operational reasons and would need to be checked and verified before it was published.