Karen Cutter Profile picture
Actuary. Australian. Receives no payment for Covid analysis. All views my own.

Oct 20, 2022, 14 tweets

The NSW Health epi report for the week ending 15 October is now out.
#COVID19Aus #COVID19NSW
You can find the full report here...
health.nsw.gov.au/Infectious/cov…

Total cases were up slightly (+1%) this week.

By age band, however, cases were up 10% in the 60+ age band

The number of people in hospital fell by 3%, much less than the 7-15% falls we've seen in the last 8 weeks

Numbers admitted to hospital were about the same as last week. And these numbers confuse me. We've had less than 400 people admitted each week for the last 5 weeks, but numbers in hospital are still close to 1,000. So either...

... people are staying in hospital a lot longer than they used to. Or maybe it has something to do with hospital acquired Covid (i.e. not counted in the admissions, but counted as in hospital with covid)? Pure speculation on my part.

30 deaths this week

About half the deaths were aged care residents

I'm giving up on trying to understand what is happening with the variants! Suffice to say they did a lot of sequencing this week and have found small numbers of both XBB (driving Singapore's wave) and BQ.1.1 (problematic in Europe).
ends/

@LettersfromTim @DavidJoffe64 @GourlaySyd My experience of the pandemic is that whenever people accuse the government of playing with the numbers, it is because there is either a misunderstanding of the statistics, the definitions are unclear, or there has been an unintentional mistake

@edjegasothy @MichaelSFuhrer And there may be other differences too

@bobepidemiology @MichaelSFuhrer @edjegasothy …in more detail compared with what they publish.

As a parallel, in workers comp each state has different rules about how long you can stay on benefits and different processes for managing claimants. So you can’t directly compare success (or otherwise) of return to work measures

@bobepidemiology @MichaelSFuhrer @edjegasothy But the states all work together to try to report a consistent measure. It’s tricky, and not entirely successful, but comes done way too try to improve comparability.

I can see the same approach working with a national CDC

@darkturkey27 @MichaelSFuhrer @edjegasothy See this graph heading - "admitted to hospital within 14 days of diagnosis". Prior to Feb, they used "admitted .. within 28 days of diagnosis".

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