A friend of mine sent me to this link
https://ncase.me/covid-19/
One of the things I'm struggling with is this sentence:
'Roughly 1 in 20 people infected with COVID-19 need to go to an ICU (Intensive Care Unit)'
A sceptic I suspect that's a pessimistic number.. but am struggling to compare it to real numbers in the UK and thus prove or disprove it.
Is there a source anywhere that tells us how many people in the UK have actually gone into hospital with a recorded covid positive result?
My line of thinking is that - given that antibody studies showed roughly 3.4 million / 6 percent of the population had antibodies by the end of June - that would mean roughly 170,000 individual people had been through hospital by that point. I think that's quite unlikely but haven't found a way to show it one way or another.
The only thing I can find is number of people in hospital for any given day. That is misleading however since people can stay in hospital for days, weeks, months so it doesn't give a distinct count of individuals.
https://www.imperial.nhs.uk/about-us/news/largest-home-antibody-testing-publishes-results
> 'Roughly 1 in 20 people infected with COVID-19 need to go to an ICU (Intensive Care Unit)'
That 1 in 20 is the cases with symptoms who seek medical attention value not the total infection population value. Most people are asymptomatic or else very mild symptoms. Just like a chest cold, so they dont show up in that number.
That is a typical number for respiratory infections serious enough to seek medical treatment. 5%. The usual spit is people at low risk of severe pneumonia have a low probability of needing ICU, people at high risk it can get as high as 50%. Usually around 30%. The ICU rate seems to correlated with hospital secondary infections. Countries with low hospital secondary infections rates have much lower ICU admittance rates.
The usual progression for high risk people is viral pneumonia, severe viral pneumonia, ARDS, then 30% / 50% of people with ARDs, death. Any other progression that ends in death is almost always due to the comorbity. A SARs infection is not the primary cause of death, just a secondary.
Almost all people who dies with a a SARs infection as the secondary cause of death already have serious constrained life expectancies (< 5 years) and had a 1/4 to 1/3 probability of dying of a severe pneumonia like respiratory infection even before SARs 2 popped up.
So in answer to my own post I think I've actually found the numbers I was looking for.
Here you can download a spreadsheet of NHS publication data
https://www.england.nhs.uk/statistics/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/09/Covid-Publication-10-09-2020.xlsx
If you go to the admissions total tab it tells you the number of admissions by day for England.
So I summed the from 19th of March until the 30th of June and got a figure of
23,545
According to Google The Population of England is 55.98 million.
6% of that is 3,358,800
So by my reckoning that results in roughly 1 in 142 cases of Covid ending up in hospital.
I wondered how this compared with Flu... and I found this page (which I've not exhaustively fact checked)
https://www.singlecare.com/blog/flu-statistics-infographic/
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) calculated the annual percentage of the U.S. population infected with the flu, and results showed that about 8 percent of the U.S. population gets sick from the flu—which translates to 26,176,000 million people a year. And, it’s estimated that 31.4 million people visit the doctor, and 200,000 end up in the hospital every flu season.
So dividing the 26 million by 200,000 means 1 in 130 cases of Flu end up in Hospital.
So allowing for some rounding/error of margin... both Flu and Covid seem to have an equal chance of putting you in hospital?
This does leave me with a question though 🙄 . Why is the number of hospital admissions with covid (23k) significantly lower than the number of dead with covid (40k ish by end of June) according to worldometer.
This does leave me with a question though 🙄 . Why is the number of hospital admissions with covid (23k) significantly lower than the number of dead with covid (40k ish by end of June) according to worldometer.
Maybe because many people suffering from covid died in care homes without ever being admitted to hospital?
