I would like to see the instructions and definitions that they sent to hospitals and laboratories too, together with the corresponding documents for Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland but I don't absolutely need them. I appreciate that you need them for your role as a pundit criticising the GSS and John needs timely data for his business.
I'm not surprised that there hasn't been time to do this, let alone produce open data. One of the things that Radstats has done in commenting on statistics, particularly those produced by government is to regard the production of statistics as a social process. People in the GSS have to compile these outputs 24-hourly, under great political pressure, with minimal time available for checking. So it is hardly surprising that mere human beings make mistakes, particularly at a time of stress. Like many other people they have also moved to remote home working, made more difficult for some who have children at home. Reports are that they are run off their feet. After all, recent Tory governments have cut health data analysis jobs as part of their austerity policies
Then in addition to producing data on coronavirus itself, they find that some data sources needed for other purposes like monitoring the economy have suddenly disappeared, including surveys such as the Labour Force Survey which use face to face interviews.
I did find a document yesterday which summarised the main indicators PHE was using, but it seems to have disappeared today. This included numbers of people recovering, about which it commented that it was unable to capture this and was looking for another indicator. So it has discovered for itself that the data are rubbish.
To answer John's question about 'UK' hospital statistics, there are no such things. Data about hospitals are collected separately in the four countries of the UK. This preceded recent devolution as England, Wales and Scotland have had separate health ministries since 1919 and N.Ireland set up its own after partition.
Data about hospital stays are submitted to national systems when the patient is discharged, as they record the diagnoses and procedures during the stay. These are published even less frequently than death registration data, so they won't have been used for the data on the telly.
My suspicion is that they are count of numbers of patients with coronavirus who have tested positive and are admitted to hospital and that this comes from the same notification as the deaths. As you need this information urgently for your business, you could enquire, using one of the email addresses on PHE's web site. Allstat isn't a discussion list, so I'm copying this to the radstats list for further discussion.
Alison Macfarlane
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Subject: Re: Data on UK Covid-19 hospitalisations?
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I agree. As you say
> It is extremely frustrating
and silly, as it would be easy to say where data came from.
I have written this
https://simonbriscoeblog.wordpress.com/2020/04/01/new-and-open-data-can-help-tackle-covid-19/ <https://simonbriscoeblog.wordpress.com/2020/04/01/new-and-open-data-can-help-tackle-covid-19/>
which explains why I have written to UKSA asking them to explore the breach in the code of practice for govt data.
Simon
> On 2 Apr 2020, at 23:57, John Whittington <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> Do any of you know where there is any published (and regularly updated) data on UK hospitalisations for Covid-19 infection.
>
> It is extremely frustrating, particularly for a very impatient person like myself, to have to wait for something like 25 days to see the effect of 'mitigation measures' on the evolution of the UK Covid-19 outbreak, by having to rely on death figures.
>
> The UK 'testing'' policy is in such a mess that I struggle to see how we can make any use of the reported 'number of cases' (which would be the earliest indicator of the effect of mitigation measures) to monitor what is happening. The second-earliest statistic would be the number of hospitalisations because of serious infections, which should show the effect of mitigations 2 or so weeks earlier than do the 'deaths' data. In the course of the televised 'Ministerial Broadcasts' for the last few days, they have shown graphs of hospitalisations (with a 'COBRA' logo in the corner), but I have so far failed miserably in searches for any available on-line data of this sort.
>
> So, as I asked, is anyone aware of any source of this data? If I can look at graphs of it on the TV each day, the data is clearly being collected.
>
> Kind Regards,
> John
>
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