The state Health Department on Thursday refused to release initial statistics ordered by Gov. Kathy Hochul, intended to differentiate hospitalized COVID-19 sufferers from patients who tested positive during treatment for other ailments, saying officials needed to first “ensure consistency and data integrity.”
The department’s claim came the same day new statistics showed 11,184 COVID-19 hospitalizations statewide — the highest since the first, deadly wave of the pandemic — and despite Hochul’s demand this week for clearer information on the reasons why coronavirus patients were admitted for treatment.
“Beginning tomorrow, we’re going to be asking all hospitals to break out for us how many people are being hospitalized because of COVID symptoms [and] how many people … happen to be testing positive, just while they’re in there for other treatments,” the governor said during a news conference in Rochester on Monday.
New questions will be added to the Hospital Emergency Response System to help explain COVID hospitalizations. APDOH spokeswoman Samantha Fuld acknowledged that officials began compiling those numbers on Tuesday through the state online Hospital Emergency Response System, known as “HERDS,” which provides real-time tallies of available beds, medical supplies and personnel, as well as information about the numbers, status and immediate needs of patients.
Fuld said the DOH added “two new additional sub-questions” to the HERDS survey that relate to “dimensionalizing a single question within current COVID-19 hospitalization and ICU figures.”
Those questions are, “How many patients with confirmed COVID-19 were admitted due to COVID-19 or complications of COVID-19?” and “How many patients with confirmed COVID were admitted where COVID was not included as one of the reasons for admission?” she said.
But Fuld said statistics based on the responses won’t be released until after officials have had time to analyze them.
Gov. Kathy Hochul said this week she wants clearer information on the reasons why coronavirus patients were admitted for treatment. Andrew Schwartz / SplashNews.com“DOH has always planned to publicly share the results of these new HERDS questions,” Fuld said in an email.
“We are in the process of reviewing and tabulating this new manually-collected data from hospitals across New York State to ensure consistency and data integrity, as we do with any new data set, and plan to release as much as is ready, as quickly as possible — as soon as tomorrow.”
“Governor Hochul and Commissioner Bassett will be presenting this data at tomorrow’s briefing,” confirmed Hochul press secretary Hazel Crampton-Hays.
On Monday, Hochul said she sought the detailed information on admissions after speaking to hospital officials about the surge in patients hospitalized following the emergence of the highly contagious Omicron variant.
Hochul said she was “disappointed to see that at least a certain percentage overall are not related to being treated for COVID,” including “numbers from 20 to sometimes 50 percent.“
“I have always wondered, we’re looking at the hospitalizations of people testing positive in a hospital,” she said.
Dr. Fritz François of NYU Langone Health said the system’s patients were primarily hospitalized for something else before testing positive. AP“Is that person in the hospital because of COVID? Or did they show up there and are routinely tested and showing positive and they may have been asymptomatic or even just had the sniffles?”
Hochul even raised the possibility that “someone is in a car accident, they go to the emergency room, they test positive for COVID while they’re there. They’re not there being treated for COVID.”
On Wednesday, The Associated Press quoted Dr. Fritz François, chief of hospital operations at the city’s private NYU Langone Health system, as saying that about 65 of its patients with COVID-19 were primarily hospitalized for something else before they were incidentally found to be infected.
Two large Seattle hospitals also found that three-quarters of the 64 patients who tested positive for the coronavirus over the past two weeks were admitted with a primary diagnosis other than COVID-19, according to the AP.
Although the US has been setting coronavirus caseload records amid the Omicron surge — including more than 1 million on Tuesday, marking a global milestone — the national hospitalization rate is less than half what it was around the same time last year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
