Secrecy over B.C.'s true number of hospitalized COVID-19 patients
CTV
The number of British Columbians in hospital due to COVID-19 is a tightly-held secret, as the province removes those who are no longer infectious from the tally – even though those individuals may spend months in treatment.
Just how many British Columbians are actually in hospital with COVID-19 is a tightly-held secret, with few privy to the true number as health officials keep two sets of numbers: one public, the other internal.
In B.C., the health minister has said COVID-19 patients in intensive care units are removed from the tally when they’re no longer infectious with the virus. That policy is in place even though they may spend months in hospital struggling to survive their infection as they occupy scarce beds and medical resources.
CTV News has asked the Ministry of Health for the number of patients admitted to hospital for COVID-19 but not counted in the public figures, but has not received a response.
Internal documents from Vancouver Coastal Health describe the patients as “off precautions,” meaning extra steps to avoid being exposed to the virus are no longer necessary. As recently as July, the health authority was notifying a relatively wide circle of staff as to how many patients were in hospital but not part of the public hospitalization figures.
For example, on July 21, an internal memo documented 38 patients hospitalized in the health authority, 12 of them in critical care, and another 29 described as “current hospitalized off COVID precautions cases” with an accompanying chart.
Subsequent memos to staff have excluded the “off precautions” data in favour of a “new streamlined version of the report,” with very few medical personnel now aware of the true number of people still hospitalized due to the virus.
Royal Columbian Hospital, in the Fraser Health Authority, calls those cases “time cleared” and their head of medicine revealed they still have COVID-19 patients who were admitted during the third wave of the pandemic in the spring.
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