The province says it will begin reporting the number of COVID patients who remain in hospital, sometimes for weeks, after they are no longer contagious.
The move follows criticism that the number of non-infectious cases in hospital wasn’t being included in daily reporting of hospital and ICU case counts.
“While some people are recovering at home after they’re no longer an active case, there are also people who are recovering in hospital,” provincial health officer Dr. Bonnie Henry said. “Most of them, the vast majority of them, are in a medical bed.
“They’re not somebody who is an ICU bed at this point.”
Health Ministry daily COVID statistics will now include three categories: the number of people in recovery in hospital, those with acute active COVID in general hospital beds and those in ICU beds.
B.C. Green Party Leader Sonia Furstenau, who has been calling for more information on the total number of COVID patients in hospital, said she is pleased with the decision, which she called a “good first step towards transparency.” She said it’s important for people to have a complete picture of the impact COVID is having on hospitals and health-care resources.
“I think it’s critical information for people to know and understand that this disease can take a toll on your health for months, if not — we may find out — years,” Furstenau said Wednesday.
“The implications of long COVID are only just being discovered as studies look at people who have symptoms and effects for months following an initial infection, and these hospital rates, where people are in hospital well past their infectious period, really point to how serious this disease can be.”
Henry said Wednesday that someone who has recovered from an acute COVID-19 infection may still need ongoing hospital care, but is no longer considered an active case, and thus hasn’t been reported in active hospitalization reports. “But they’ve already been in those statistics.”
Last week, Damien Contandriopoulos, a public health researcher at the University of Victoria, called on the province to provide the missing numbers, saying a COVID patient in a hospital bed is a COVID patient in a hospital bed, regardless of whether the patient is infectious.
“Indeed it seems there has been some confusion,” Contandriopoulos said Wednesday. “Apparently, Dr Henry and the government thought the population wanted them to control the pandemic on the BCCDC [reporting] dashboard. But what the population wants is them to control the pandemic in the real world.
“So unfortunately people weren’t super grateful at the efforts to just hide the numbers.”
Nanaimo-based infectious-disease specialist and critical-care physician Dr. David Forrest said last week there were a dozen COVID-19 patients in intensive-care unit beds at Nanaimo Regional General Hospital on Sept. 26, but public reports would only show 11 because the twelfth patient is recovering.
Many doctors complained about the disconnect between the number of COVID patients actually in hospital beds and those reflected in health officials’ data reporting, he said.
Forrest said it suggests a misunderstanding by government about what data should be reported.
