Holland (Europe Brief News), Some covid patients in the nursing wards of Dutch hospitals
are tested positive, but they are hospitalized not because of the corona. However, there is no national record of how many people are infected. In Groningen, this would be one-third of the number of patients.
Every patient tested positive for corona in a Dutch hospital is included in the figures for
hospital occupancy published daily by the LCPS, the National Coordination Center for Patients Distribution.
Now that the Omikron variant of the coronavirus seems to make people less sick, there is a
greater chance that these patients also include people who test positive for corona but did
not come to the hospital for that reason. Such as patients with broken hip or heart complaints.
The NICE Foundation, which monitors hospital occupancy, confirms that all positively tested persons count. According to a spokesperson, 90 to 95 per cent of patients with a corona infection on the IC are there because of corona complaints. “We do not have such additional information for the normal nursing wards,” said a spokesperson.
These patients are asymptomatic. We find out that they are infected because we test very easily.
Hospitals themselves do not keep this information about nursing wards. The UMCG Groningen estimates that about a third of the patients who tested positive there were admitted for another cause.
These patients are asymptomatic. We find out that they are infected because we test very easily,” said a spokesperson. UMC Utrecht and Radboudumc in Nijmegen estimate that these are small numbers. The Amphia Hospital in Breda and the Catharina Hospital in Eindhoven do not keep the data separately.
Media in Germany and England also previously reported that the corona infection was not the reason for admission in nursing wards sometimes in 30 percent of patients.
Corona department
The distinction does not matter that much for the hospitals, they argue, because every patient who is diagnosed with corona must still be nursed in the special corona wards due to the risk of contamination.
The hospital occupancy has been one of the figures on which the corona policy has been determined for two years now.
This week, doctor and professor of Medicine Marcel Levi stated that it is a distorted picture to include patients who do not have corona complaints in the corona recordings. Since omikron gives lighter symptoms, a corona infection will be diagnosed ‘accidentally’ in relatively more patients.
On Tuesday, there were 1,185 covid patients with a corona in Dutch hospitals, of whom 302 were in intensive care units and 883 in the nursing wards. Those numbers have been falling for several weeks.
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