Thread by @KarenCutter4

Have NSW hospitalisations hit the previous peak of January 2022?
A thread/
#CovidAus #covidnsw

On the face of it, it looks like not. However the January peak of 2,943 in hospital with COVID-19 used a different definition of "hospitalised with COVID" compared with the current wave

Back in January, the definition of "hospitalised with COVID" was if the time between COVID symptoms and admission date was less than 28 days.
This changed on 3 Feb 2022 to be less than 14 days, resulting in less people counting as being hospitalised for COVID.

Most NSW Health reporting metrics changed on this date, however one did not, being the Critical Intelligence Unit's Risk Monitoring Dashboard.
Reporting in this dashboard did not change until 28 April.
It can be found here...
aci.health.nsw.gov.au/covid-19/criti…

The dashboard includes the measure "Weekly new admissions to a ward / ICU". Dividing this by 7 should give you the 7-day average new hospital admissions.
In theory, this should line up with the 7-day average hospital admissions included in the weekly epidemiology report.

I say "in theory" they should line up, but they do not.
There are a whole raft of definitional differences that might exist between the dashboard and the epi report. The dashboard includes some detail of how its measure is calculated, but the epi report does not.

While the measures are different, the relationship between the two can give us some insight.
The dashboard was 2x the weekly epi report when the dashboard used 28 days.
This dropped to 1.5x when the dashboard changed to 14 days.