The Ontario government will soon update the way it reports COVID-19 hospitalizations.
Alexandra Hilkene, a spokeswoman for Health Minister Christine Elliott, said on Friday that the province will soon distinguish between those directly admitted due to COVID and incidental hospitalizations.
“Currently, Ontario hospitalizations include patients who were admitted for COVID-19, as well as people who were admitted for other reasons and now test positive for COVID-19,” Hilkene said in an email to Global News.
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She said that on December 29, the province asked hospitals to update their daily reports to distinguish between the two.
Hilkene said that data collection on this information began last week, adding that public reporting will begin “in the near future.”
In another email from Hilkene on Friday morning, he said the province is also assessing whether it needs to update the way deaths are reported.
“Due to the highly communicable Omicron variant, we are evaluating whether reports need to be updated to distinguish between causal and incidental deaths related to COVID-19, similar to the work being done on hospital reports,” he said.
“For example, we have heard anecdotal evidence from a small number of people receiving palliative care in collective care settings who sadly died with COVID but not necessarily from the virus.
“While any change in the reports will not change the fact that these people tragically lost their lives, it is important to be transparent and give the public as much context as we can.”
The message came as Ontario reported 43 COVID-19-related deaths on Friday, 42 of which occurred within 10 days.
Ontario’s chief medical officer for health, Dr. Kieran Moore, was asked about incidental COVID-19 hospitalizations in the province at a press conference on Dec. 30.
He said preliminary conversations with Kingston Frontenac Lennox and Addington indicated that about 50 percent of their admissions were incidental.
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“So if someone has a broken leg, if they come in, they all get screened and come back positive,” Moore said.
“We don’t want those numbers to contribute to our understanding of the hospitalization burden in Ontario, so we’ve asked all of our hospital partners to be more aggressive in their reporting so that we can provide a trusted source of data for decision making. manufacturers and Ontarians on the impact of COVID on our hospital industry. “
Moore said “very preliminary” conversations have revealed that when the virus is more prevalent in the community, there may be a greater chance of incidental cases.
When it comes to intensive care admissions for COVID-19, Moore said he’s “more confident” in that number, as hospitals are only supposed to report those with critical COVID-related illnesses. However, the UCI reports are also under review.
“We have never had a virus so prevalent in the community that people came in incidentally,” Moore said.
Meanwhile, Ontario on Friday reported the highest number of hospitalized COVID patients since the start of the pandemic. There were 2,472 people hospitalized with the virus, 193 more than the day before.
There were 338 patients in intensive care, an increase of 19.
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