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New, Preliminary State Data Shows Half of People In NYC Hospitals with COVID-19 Were Admitted for Other Reasons
By
Gwynne Hogan
Published Jan 7, 2022
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By
Gwynne Hogan
Published Jan 7, 2022
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About half the COVID patients in New York City hospitals were admitted for some other ailment and subsequently diagnosed with the virus, according to preliminary data from New York state released for the first time Friday.
The state issued the numbers as part of a new approach announced this week, to track how many people entered the hospital for reasons other than Covid-19 and were later found positive. The numbers show 50% of the 5,894 patients in New York City hospitals were admitted primarily for Covid-19. Statewide, about 42% of hospital patients with COVID had been admitted for other issues and were subsequently diagnosed.
The figures, which Gov. Kathy Hochul said Monday she would instruct hospitals to collect, mark the first time the state has released a breakdown of hospitalizations detailing whether COVID was the primary factor. The numbers do not mean that a patient contracted the virus in the hospital; simply that a patient went for treatment for another reason and was found to have COVID-19. The data so far accounts for just two days: January 4th and 5th.
But the new numbers begin to paint a clearer picture of COVID-19 hospitalizations across the state, amid the surge of the omicron variant, which is understood to be more contagious, but thought to cause less severe illness than earlier variants.
Hochul said Friday the number of people hospitalized for any reason had remained relatively steady since Dec. 21, inching up to 28,500 by Jan. 5, an increase of just 700 people. The share of those people who’d tested positive for COVID-19, however, had surged from 16 to 42 percent.
“Think of all the other reasons people end up in a hospital. It’s an overdose, it’s a car accident, it’s a heart attack,” Hochul said, explaining the new data. Hospitals test people for COVID-19 as a precaution before admitting them, and had previously had reported those numbers to the state combined with the number of people who were hospitalized for COVID-19 symptoms as their primary condition.
Hochul asked hospitals to start separating the numbers so the state could get a better understanding of who was in the hospital with COVID-19, with positivity rates topping 22% statewide.
“The sheer numbers of people infected are high, but I want to see whether or not the hospitalizations correlate with that,” the governor said this week.
In recent days, New York City health officials had explained the confusion around hospitalization numbers, though they had not provided a breakdown of their own. The subject came up at a Dec. 30 press conference and again on Thursday.
“As you would expect because there’s so much community transmission, we’ve had people [in] car accidents COVID positive, coming to deliver a baby, COVID positive,” said Dr. Mitchell Katz, the CEO of the city’s public hospital system on Thursday. “Absolutely, there are people as part of those hospital statistics who are COVID cases.”
Katz also emphasized some hospitalizations fall into a third bucket; people with underlying illnesses that were exacerbated by the virus.
“Someone has underlying lung disease and they have heart disease and their baseline is a little short of breath, and then they come in [with] worsening shortness of breath and they’re COVID positive, so COVID is probably a contributor,” he said. “There’s also a large group in the middle.”
In an interview with WNYC's Brian Lehrer, Health Commissioner Dave Chokshi sounded a similar theme.
"Sometimes there is a gray area. For example, I helped take care of a patient the other day who has emphysema, and they were found to be infected with COVID-19 and required hospitalization," he said. "In that case, perhaps, the emphysema would have required hospitalization even without the infection, but COVID-19 could also have tipped them over to where they need a higher level of care."
Health officials said the number of New York City residents in intensive care units was also increasing, with 666 patients admitted as of Wednesday, a number that’s more than tripled in the last three weeks, according to state data. About 79 percent of the city’s COVID-19 hospitalizations were among unvaccinated people, according to data through mid-December.
Dr. Denis Nash, professor of Epidemiology at CUNY University’s Graduate School of Public Health said it was good news fewer patients than previously understood were being treated for COVID-19 as their primary ailment, but he added patients with COVID pose logistical challenges for hospitals, some of which are already struggling with staffing issues, due to infection control protocol.
“Large numbers of patients being hospitalized with COVID as opposed to because of COVID also complicates care delivery,” Nash said. “The case fatality rate is expected to be lower with omicron when beds and oxygen are available. But all bets are off when there is no room for everyone who needs care and when there’s not enough [health care workers] to meet demand.”
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Gwynne Hogan
Gwynne Hogan is a former Gothamist reporter.
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