Enhanced COVID dashboard still lacks key metric of new hospital admissions

The province upgraded the COVID-19 dashboard this week, but it still doesn't include a key metric officials use to decide whether to change restriction levels under the winter plan  — the seven-day average of new hospital admissions.

Department of Health officials have not responded to questions about whether it will be added.

There is a way to figure it out using the data available on the COVID-19 dashboard, if you know where to look, are willing to do some math and to keep track over time.

You need to calculate the day-over-day difference in total hospitalizations to date and the daily difference in current hospitalizations, add those together to get the new daily admissions, then add the new daily admissions figures for seven days together and divide by seven.

But there's a caveat.

It's unclear whether Public Health considers all new admissions — including people hospitalized "for COVID-19" as well as those hospitalized "with COVID-19," or only those admitted for COVID. Department officials did not respond to a request for information.

If it's the latter, then there isn't enough data available on the dashboard to calculate the figure.

The other problem is the province hasn't said what the trigger number is for assessing whether to move to a more or less restrictive level, only that the seven-day average of new admissions is a key metric.

Last week, Dr. Jennifer Russell, chief medical officer of health, released a graph showing the seven-day average is going down, but the graph didn't include exact numbers for each day.

She did say the number had peaked a week prior at 18 per day and had been "on a slow but steady decline since then," which she described as "a very good trend" and what officials were "hoping to see."

New admissions are "an important indicator" of COVID's spread in the province, she said, especially now that it's impossible to get an accurate case count, given the limited use of PCR tests and reliance on people self-reporting positive rapid test results.

Ray Harris, a Fredericton-based data analyst with Data Wazo, who maintains a COVID-19 tracking website, believes the province is using only new admissions "for" COVID, and not including people in hospital "with" COVID, who were admitted for other reasons but later tested positive for the virus.

"The only reason I say that is because of the chart that was shown during that news conference, where they did the phase change, didn't quite match my numbers," he said.

"They weren't directionally correct, meaning that it was similar in terms of a trend to what I had. But the numbers themselves weren't exact, so I'm under the impression that what the phase change trigger is is new hospitalizations 'for' COVID, which we don't have information on the dashboard to work that out ourselves."