More than half of Covid hospitalisations were from people who only tested positive after admission to hospital, according to leaked data.
The data, which covers all NHS trusts in England, showed that, as of July 22, just 44 per cent of patients labelled as being hospitalised with the virus had tested positive by the time they were admitted. But most of the cases were actually not detected until patients went through standard Covid tests, carried out on every person admitted to hospital for any reason, reported the Telegraph.
A breakdown of daily coronavirus hospital diagnoses, seen by the paper, showed that of more than 780 hospitalisations dated last Thursday, 44 per cent involved people who tested positive in the 14 days before hospital entry.
A further 43 per cent were made within two days of admission, with 13 per cent made in the days and weeks that followed, including those likely to have caught the virus in hospital.
Prof Carl Heneghan, director of the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine at the University of Oxford, told the Telegraph: “This data is incredibly important, and it should be published on an ongoing basis.
“When people hear about hospitalisations with Covid, they will assume that Covid is the likely cause, but this data shows something quite different – this is about Covid being detected after tests were looking for it.”
“This needs to be fixed as a matter of urgency,” he continued, adding that the published data could lead the public “towards false conclusions.”
The leaked statistics come from NHS daily situation reports, collected by all hospital trusts in England.
One NHS data expert told the Telegraph that the published statistics distorted the true picture. They said it created an “impression that all these people are going into hospital with Covid, and that simply is not the case.”
