Up to one in three Covid patients may have caught the illness in hospital, official figures show. That makes it hard to use the Covid hospitalisation data to justify new lockdown restrictions. The Telegraph has more.
At the peak this week, 31% of Covid patients included in the NHS’ daily admission figures for London had already been in the hospital for more than a week before testing positive, suggesting transmission occurred on the ward.
Separate figures show that of more than 6,000 patients in hospitals across England who have tested positive for coronavirus, 29% of them are primarily being treated by doctors for other conditions.
It comes as the figures for admissions in the capital edge towards the 400 a day mark, which the Government is said to be using as a threshold for introducing new lockdown measures.
Ministers have been carefully watching the picture in London’s hospitals before making any decisions, as its omicron outbreak is a few weeks ahead of the rest of the U.K.
But both scientists and MPs have called on the Government to consider the fact that many patients with Covid may actually be catching it in hospital. They have urged them to discount those being treated for other conditions from their calculations.
Ministers were warned that further restrictions would be “difficult to justify” if they did not look at the facts behind the data.
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