average stay for Covid - is it really, really long?

[SockYarn]

Scottish figures are hugely encouraging. No deaths for 2 days, 7 days rolling average new infections running at 14 per day. 5 people in ICU.

Hospital admissions way down too - average of 4 per day. This has been coming down for weeks, middle of May it was about 32 admissions a day and at the peak, on 1st April, 212 admissions.

Yet the government figures are still showing that there are 456 people in hospital, including the 5 in ICU. Now doesn't that indicate that the people who are admitted, are, on average there for a looooong time? Or does it mean that some of the people were already seriously ill with whatever and are recorded as a Covid case, but would have been in hospital anyway because of their underlying condition?

Anecdotally, a friend of a friend is a nurse who caught Covid19 in March and was seriously ill (type 1 diabetic, other health issues), was in ICU, ventilated, and is still in hospital albeit on a normal ward.

Are there any figures for average hospital stay?

www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.23.20076042v1

According to this study average stay is 7 days

Really? Who knows what's going on then as the rolling 7 day average for hospital admission is 10.5 - you'd expect between 70 and 100 people in hospital.

Not 456.

Well to be honest, for any illness, if you are in ICU, you’ll be in hospital for weeks, probably months. First you need to recover from actual illness (or injury) making you so critically ill & then there’ll be significant rehab as being kept alive by machines has serious consequences that take a long time to recover from, if ever. It’s not like soaps where you just wake up & can immediately talk, eat, walk! Particularly ventilators, they knacker your body. Your body forgets how to breathe by itself. All very scary

Its not a Covid thing though, it’s just a serious illness thing..

Also most testing is happening in hospitals.
If you look you will find it
So not necessarily that people were admitted because of covid but either had it on admission either mildly or no symptoms or got covid in hospital.
Their length of stay may not be because of the covid but because of whatever they went in for in the first place.. if that makes sense.
Also 7 day average probably indicates a 24 hrs stay up to months

That's true, if you're testing everyone who's there even for an unrelated issue you're going to find the cases which would go undetected elsewhere.

I know what you mean about why they were in in the first place - if you're admitted to hospital with something very serious which will keep you in there for 6 months, the fact you were also diagnosed with covid is neither here nor there.

Lot of people in hospital with eg brain injuries, old age rehab, etc . Would imagine a proportion of them have caught covid whilst in hospital . I presume they also count psychiatric hospitals too . Longest patient I had was about 24 months continuous hospital care .

I think Aberdeen and Glasgow are knocked off too because probably taking the most seriously ill for huge distances, Aberdeen is an ECMO centre for instance . So probably do have patients staying there for longer than average .

It is reported that 20% of people in hospital with covid caught it whilst already in hospital with something else. So 1 in 5 hospital cases are hospital acquired infections

For all these reasons above, I don't see why Sturgeon keeps mentioning the numbers of people in hospital at her daily briefing - it's the NEW admissions she should be concentrating on.