In yet another reflection of Oregon’s tentative transition out of the acute phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, health officials as of Friday will release coronavirus hospitalization totals only once a week, down from one update for every workday.
Considered a key metric throughout the pandemic, the Oregon Health Authority’s decision to provide fresh numbers only on Wednesdays reflects the state’s confidence that current trends don’t augur a severe wave, as well as the agency’s apparent desire to wind down work it believes is no longer necessary.
Oregon’s understanding of the pandemic has long been hitched to hospitalization counts. Predictions of surge peaks numbering in multiple thousands of occupied beds triggered anxious press events where officials begged Oregonians to save the health care system by masking up. Updates showing steady declines were served up as evidence that citizens’ efforts to protect each other had paid off.
But even as Oregon’s seventh COVID-19 wave continues with, as of Thursday, sharply rising hospitalizations, state officials and experts tracking pandemic trends don’t believe hospitalizations are the vital data point they once were. Nor do they believe trends indicate the current surge will morph into a wave that could threaten the state’s health care system.
The Oregon Health Authority will continue to receive and track hospitalization statistics internally, a spokesperson for the agency said, and will resume more frequent publishing of the data if it deems it necessary.
“As the pandemic changes, we are constantly balancing the response, information, and resource needs,” spokesman Rudy Owens said in an emailed statement. The daily data release “was necessary during the COVID-19 pandemic when information was quickly evolving and changing, and when the number of COVID-19 and other patients stretched the capacity of Oregon’s hospitals.”
University of Washington Professor Ali Mokdad, who has been tracking and modeling cases and hospitalizations throughout the pandemic, said the health authority’s decision to reduce reporting is in line with what he has seen elsewhere.
Nationally and in Oregon, cases are leveling off or declining. Hospitalizations are still climbing because they always lag behind cases, but should soon start falling, too, Mokdad said.
“That’s a lot of work on a daily basis,” Mokdad said of the effort necessary to prepare and publish data.
The number of Oregonians hospitalized with positive coronavirus tests has climbed 26% in the past week but remains far below the nearly 1,200-person record during last year’s delta wave. Patients requiring intensive care remain comparatively low.
Coronavirus hospitalizations stood at nearly 420 as of Thursday, more than 90 occupied beds higher than what Oregon’s chief pandemic forecaster believed would be the current wave’s peak. Even now, that forecaster, Oregon Health & Science University’s Peter Graven, has delayed release of new projections by a week in part because of difficulty incorporating new omicron subvariants into the model.
Like Mokdad, Graven was mostly unconcerned that OHA will now publish the data weekly as opposed to daily. In theory, he said, delayed data release could result in delayed behavior change, if people don’t know about changes in hospitalization trends. But those potential issues could be dealt with if people know where else to find analogous data, including on Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Oregon Association of Hospitals and Health Systems webpages, which don’t precisely match previous state tallies but do indicate general trajectories.
“That would require communication,” Graven said of alternative sources needing to be more widely known.
And hospitalizations simply aren’t the statistic they once were. Graven said well over half of the COVID-19 patients at OHSU are incidental cases where the person is seeking care for something other than COVID-19 but tests positive upon admission, a pattern likely seen across hospital systems. He believes emergency department visits for COVID-like symptoms are becoming a more reliable indicator.
Along with the daily hospitalization count, the health authority will also stop daily releases of how many COVID-19 patients are in intensive care units and how many are on ventilators. The same applies to its hospitalization and hospital capacity statistics broken down by Oregon region and each facility’s seven-day hospitalization average.
“OHA will continue to monitor these data,” Owens said. “If circumstances warrant it, OHA would resume more frequent public reporting of hospitalization data.”
— Fedor Zarkhin
"Stop" - Google News
July 02, 2022 at 09:00PM
https://ift.tt/OSM8aXA
Hospitalizations are rising. Why Oregon decided now is time to stop disclosing daily patient numbers - OregonLive
"Stop" - Google News
https://ift.tt/H0nuolF
https://ift.tt/QYy1HZu
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "Hospitalizations are rising. Why Oregon decided now is time to stop disclosing daily patient numbers - OregonLive"
Post a Comment