Hospitalization data tweeted by Baton Rouge General

I don't think we should concern ourselves with the constant fear porn around the number of positive cases or the positivity rate. What's important is knowing if our hospitals are being over burdened and what factors are leading to infections serious enough to actually require hospitalization.

HOSPITALIZATION resource consumption is most important metric IMO.

Mild or even moderate infections are far less concerning than the potential of those that are seriously ill who might be in an overburdened hospital that can't treat them as carefully or efficiently as they should. I can give a shite if there are thousands of new cases if they aren't resulting in hospitalizations or deaths. I do care if our fellow citizens are falling seriously ill, dying, or consuming massive amounts of our limited healthcare resources.

IMO THESE are the type of hospitalization numbers that should be driving public policy. Not overall positive cases that CNN constantly harps on. Our primary concern is how many people are being hospitalized and if they are getting the quality of treatment that they deserve (and are paying for).

The data below gives some hints, but keep in mind that they are only telling part of the story:

- The charts excludes all data of potential patients with cases not serious enough to be hospitalized. We know there are infections occurring with mild are moderate symptoms. Most of those people aren't being hospitalized.
- The charts do not indicate what vaccines the vaccinated patients got, and when they got them.
- The charts do not indicate how many hospitalizations are serious enough to require oxygen or ventilators. Just hospitalization status.
- The charts do not indicate what proportion of people in the BRG catchment area who have contracted covid were vaccinated vs unvaccinated. It's only a snapshot of who had cases serious enough to be hospitalized within the BRG catchment chain (Baton Rouge metro area).
- The chart doesn't show % resource utilization at Baton Rouge general (for either beds, nurses, or doctors). So we can't determine if they are actually at risk of reducing their service level to sick patients...at least not from these charts.


The snapshots from the past two weeks:





Unfortunately I can't find a similar chart for Our Lady of the Lake, which is by far the largest hospital in the state. But they did report that 238 of those hospitalized are not vaccinated. 38 are vaccinated. No breakdown for age. I MUCH prefer the breakdown and graphs that Baton Rouge General Provided over simple tabulations that Our Lady of the Lake provided.

Some takeaways:

- The overwhelming majority of patients with cases serious enough to be hospitalized at BRG are unvaccinated.

- ZERO patients under 20. And we do know from other sources that the overwhelming majority of people under 20 have not been vaccinated in the US. I suspect the hospitalization trend for this group is because younger people are far less likely to need hospitalization when infected. Which means AGE is still the primary determining factor when it comes to symptom severity. ETA: This could also be because of the nearby OLOL Children's hospital handling that patient load....so the under 20 hospitalization data might not be strong enough for any conclusions on infection severity.

- People ages 50-59 who have not been vaccinated are the largest population group of those being hospitalized b/c of a Covid infection.

- There is a clear bell curve shown. There are fewer people in the hospital at BRG who are extremely young or extremely old. I suspect that it's because the young are not particularly vulnerable and the old are more likely to have been vaccinated.

- Fewer people over 60 are requiring hospitalization than those under 60. This is likely due to the highly vulnerable elderly population seeing higher vaccination rates in Louisiana and younger people just not being at risk for serious symptoms



ETA: Important to note that there is a large Children's Hospital barely a block from Baton Rouge General. That Hospital is run by Our Lady of the Lake, which doesn't report data as clearly as Baton Rouge General. So its' possible that there are more Covid patients under 20 years of age in the Baton Rouge area, but they are being treated at the nearby Children's hospital instead and are thus excluded from this graphic. Thanks Dewster for pointing that out.