I keep half an eye on the data from my local NHS trust, partly because it's my local one and partly because it's in the area of London that started seeing the first effects of Omicron in the UK. One thing I've noticed is that mechanical ventilation numbers for London as a whole don't really show much happening:
But there has been something of a rise in my local trust (King's).
Thanks for the info. I've now been through the dashboard graphs for every single trust in England.
The patients in mechanical ventilation beds data can be especially challenging to interpret, due to the fact that many trusts dont end up with numbers that are large enough to cancel out the sort of 'noise' we can get in data due to individual cases, outbreaks etc.
Kings is one of the trusts where there have been sufficient numbers in the past to overcome that more comprehensively, and its one of only a few that are showing the trend you have spotted at the moment. Its far from the only one where this new large wave has brought levels back up to where they were earlier on in the previous Delta wave, as the numbers in that wave had been very slowly declining for some time in plenty of places. But its one of only a few where the levels have now exceeded the maximum height they reached in the Delta wave, and are now back to something more like levels last seen in March during a steep descent from much higher levels that were reached about a year ago. Croydon and Frimley are two other examples, but with smaller figures involved and slightly different timing.
When looking far beyond London, these mechanical ventilation figures remind me why I moaned so much about the government response to the Delta wave. There are all manner of places where, relative to the pre-vaccine era peaks, the long Delta wave really sucked when viewed via this measurement. A consequence of using many of the gains of vaccination to enable there to be less rules, combined with the limits of vaccines and the number of people who were still not vaccinated. Unlike most of the data pictures I see from London trusts, there were quite a few trusts where it is possible to claim that number of people in mechanical ventilation beds was only roughly halved compared to last winters peak levels. Or worse in some cases, but not consistently over the entire Delta period. Omicron impact hasnt shown up in some of those places yet. And in others things are a big mess where there may be other stories going on too, such as changes to which hospitals the most seriously ill covid patients are being directed to.
Here is a list of some of the trusts that stuck out to me in various different ways when it came looking at dashboard graphs of that particular mechanical ventilation data. But some of them are small and the stories wont always be straightforward at all. And only some of them are telling fairly clear stories about the Omicron waves impact, I didnt compile this list with one particular picture or trend in mind, different ones stuck out or posed questions in various different ways. And some of them only involve small numbers.
Barking, Havering and Redbridge University Hospitals NHS Trust
Croydon Health Services NHS Trust
Frimley Health NHS Foundation Trust
Birmingham Women's and Children's NHS Foundation Trust
Northampton General Hospital NHS Trust
Liverpool University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust
Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust
North Bristol NHS Trust
United Lincolnshire Hospitals NHS Trust
University Hospitals Plymouth NHS Trust
University Hospitals Sussex NHS Foundation Trust
Yeovil District Hospital NHS Foundation Trust
Northern Care Alliance NHS Ft
Northern Lincolnshire and Goole NHS Foundation Trust
Northumbria Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust
if I collected library stats the way the government collects covid stats I'd be out of a job and rightly so
www.joe.co.uk
