Operation "Hospitalization"

Russia is a leader in the number of new patients with Covid in the world. Research "Cold"

At the end of January 2022, after the appearance of a new Coronavirus -Omcrono strain, Russia began to update historical records every day in the number of new sick people. Against the backdrop of this, the operating room to combat coronavirus, and with it the state media suddenly stopped focusing on the number of infections (this statistics were key from the very beginning of the epidemic in the spring of 2020), and instead focused on another epidemic indicator - the number of hospitalized per day, which, unlike the number of infection, remains relatively stable. The "cold" clearly explains how this happened and why Russia is a world leader in hospitalization.

Spite of records

The explosive increase in incidence due to Omcron began in Russia immediately after the long New Year holidays. Since January 12, the numbers in daily reports every day increased and by the 20th number they came close to the historical maximum of 41 thousand sick per day, which was recorded in November last year. Russia approached a hundred thousand a day already on January 28.

On the same day, January 20, the Federal Operational Code to combat coronavirus changed the format of a daily report without warning. If earlier the report began with the number of identified sick and tables of the regions, then on January 20 a new number appeared in the main summary: the number of hospitalized. Already on January 21, he was brought in first place in infographics.

Similar changes have occurred in the news of the coronavirus in state media. For example, on January 21, RIA Novosti in its traditional “federal summary” still focused on infection (“Schedule shows the scale of growth”), but already on the 22nd day the main theme of steel was hospitalization.

Other examples of a sharp change in the format of daily reports in the federal media were collected by open data analyst Alexander Dragan.

Officially, the reasons for such a change were not explained in any way, but indirectly the situation was described by Deputy Prime Minister Tatyana Golikova at the meeting on January 26: “Monitoring of indicators in the healthcare system since the beginning of the year indicates some change in the current trends in connection with the emergence of a new strain of the virus. The hospitalization indicator over the past week for 100 thousand people amounted to 39 and increased by the second week of the year by 9.3%. During the same period, the indicator of new identified cases and also for 100 thousand people amounted to 231 and increased by 102.4%. ”

In other words, if the infection has doubled at once, then hospitalization is only one tenth. That is, now in state reports the main place is occupied by the indicator that does not grow so fast.

From a clean sheet

The number of daily hospitalized patients is the most important indicator during the epidemic. Much attention is paid to him all over the world especially now, since with the seeming “softness” Omicron can still overload hospitals. This is due to the rate of the spread of a new variant of coronavirus: those who infects Omicron less often go to hospitals, but there are so many cases of the disease that in the absolute numbers of new patients in hospitals are even more than in past waves. In other countries, the number of hospitalizations was included in the reports of coronavirus since the beginning of the pandemic.

At the same time, in Russia until January 20, 2022, hospitalization data were not disclosed at all. This means that those numbers that the operastack now publishes as the most important, simply have nothing to compare every day.

However, it is worth paying attention to Golikova’s words about hospitalizations in the third week of January: she called an indicator in 39 cases per hundred thousand of the population. This is what this figure will look like if we compare Russia with other countries.

That is, Russia in mid -January ranked second in the world in terms of the number of new patients in hospitals. Does this schedule mean that we are at the peak of hospitalization, like the USA, Israel and France? It is not known - since the Russian authorities did not provide any data on how in Russia they were hospitalized earlier.

“All operational data on the situation with the incidence of COVID-19 are published daily on the Stopkoronavirus.rf portal, we do not carry out the unloading of any additional data,” the press secretary of Golikova Anastasia Astashkin told the cold, noting that the Ministry of Health collected data on hospitalization. "Cold" turned to the Ministry of Health, but for four days did not receive a response to the request.

Questions also arise to the specific figures, which are now published by the federal operative. The fact is that some regions previously reported on daily hospitalization. The most notable among them are Moscow and St. Petersburg - leaders in the number of sick and hospitalized in the country. New federal data coincides with the fact that the Moscow City Hall publishes, but the reports in St. Petersburg are very different.

“Most likely, they take [information about the number of hospitalized] directly from the federal register. Perhaps another temporary cut, ”the paper was told in the Health Committee of St. Petersburg.

The largest hospitals

In the absence of official data, the “cold” tried to restore the schedule of daily hospitalizations in Russia from the beginning of the epidemic - according to information from the regions. Having studied the sites and social networks of local operational headquarters and the Ministry of Health, Kholod discovered only ten regions that have ever published such information: Moscow, St. Petersburg, Sevastopol, Ivanovo, Leningrad and Murmansk regions, the Republic of Kabardino-Balkaria, Mari El, North Ossetia and Tuva.

These regions account for only 17% of the population of Russia, but, having detailed data on the largest and most affected by coronavirus to the subjects (Moscow and St. Petersburg), we can roughly evaluate how the number of people hospitalized for one hundred thousand of the population changed over the past two years. In this schedule, the amount of hospitalizations per day is divided by the amount of the population of those regions that provided data on the specified day. The official data of Stopkoronavirus.rf from January 20, 2022 are given for comparison.

The peak calculation indicator-16 hospitalizations per day per hundred thousand of the population in December 2020-approximately corresponds to 23 thousand new patients per day (now the opera station reports 12-13 thousand per day). The total number of coronavirus patients through Russian hospitals can thus be 7-8 million people.

If we add other countries to the schedule and calculate the number of hospitalized in the week, it can be seen that now Russia is far from the maximum values. But for the entire time of the epidemic in the number of hospitalized patients with coronavirus, Russia has much overtook other countries.

This amount of hospitalized is indirectly confirmed by rare statements by the Minister of Health Mikhail Murashko about the number of employed beds. For example, at the peak of the second wave at the end of 2020, he said that there are 250 thousand coronavirus patients in Russian hospitals. In November 2021, when general non -working days were announced in Russia, 258 thousand beds were already employed. These are huge numbers in comparison with other countries. In the United States, where the population is more than two times more than, during the epidemic, there were no more than 155 thousand during the epidemic, and the country reached this mark already during Omicron.

In total, in Russia at the end of 2020 there were 1.19 million hospital beds. This is one of the highest indicators in the world per capita: for example, three times more than in the United States. According to this indicator, Russia can only be compared with Germany. But in Germany, the hospitalization of covid patients for all the time did not exceed 15 patients per week per hundred thousand of the population - which is six times less than Russian maximums.