I have been following the COVID trend since the epidemic began. To me, the best indicator of COVID in our area has been the hospitalizations. Cases numbers can change based on the number of tests and who is being tested, the same with positivity percent. Deaths, can be a good indicator, but they lag the onset of serious COVID cases by several weeks, Hospitalizations, provided they haven’t changed the criteria for who is admitted to the hospital with COVID should be a reliable indicator of not just who is getting sick, but of the severity of the epidemic.
Back in March and April, COVID cases at our hospital shot up precipitously as the disease burned like wildfire through our area nursing homes, reaching its zenith the last week of April, and then by the end of May fell fairly precipitously. In those early days, nearly all the hospitalizations were people from nursing homes, elderly from assisted living, people in prisons, and group homes. The first spike lasted until June, and then nearly disappeared entirely by the end...
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