English Chess Forum

Do you know from where to find an age breakdown of the following Covid statistics?

1. Infections or "cases"
2. Hospitalisations
3. Deaths

Thanks.

The ONS publishes weekly breakdowns by age here.

John Upham wrote: ↑

Fri Oct 15, 2021 12:27 pm

Do you know from where to find an age breakdown of the following Covid statistics?

1. Infections or "cases"
2. Hospitalisations
3. Deaths

Thanks.

I’m more than ten years out from being a user of hospital data. A proxy for infections will be positive tests. Some of these will be multiple tests for the same persons and some could be false positives. Other infections will go undiagnosed especially when people are asymptomatic and not everyone with symptoms will come forward for testing.

There will be historical information on COVID (and suspected COVID) admissions in the Hospital Episode Statistics (HES). You’ll need to know the international classifications (ICD-11) codes and their definitions. The World Health Organisation (WHO) has issued an array of new ICD-11 codes over the previous 18 months to cover all sorts of COVID-related issues. See here https://www.who.int/standards/classific ... e-outbreak.

Remember that people with COVID-19 die in the community as well as in hospital so as Angus suggests ONS is probably the best place to look for figures on deaths. Their data will be based on local reporting and death certification. It’s important to recognise that not all people who die within 28 days of a positive test die from COVID, so it depends on what’s on the death certificate as the primary cause.

I hope this helps a bit, but it may just muddy the water. You probably need to engage a University Research Department to do a full analysis, and no doubt that’s going on now somewhere, or will be by the time the Public Enquiry comes around.

Many thanks for the help.

It would be interesting to overlay the hospitalisations and deaths data with data on those persons vaccinations or otherwise.

Is this information available?

Well there are codes for all this and I imagine the data is stored in everyone’s electronic health care record. So it should possible, but access to personal healthcare data is heavily guarded and subject to extremely tight rules. Only those with legitimate research requirements or established national clinical audits or national conditions registries, will be able to gain access to such data and only then with the approval of NHSX. I don’t suppose “it would be interesting” would fit the bill!

Public Heath England publishes technical briefings every couple of weeks and up until quite recently these showed for England, for sequenced and
genotyped Delta variant cases, counts of the number of identified cases, hospital admissions and deaths within 28 days broken down by vaccination status and (broad) age group. See for example Technical Briefing 23 (table 5, p19-20). Is that the sort of thing you're after, John?

Unlikely to be released to British Chess News. Would the Berkshire League Secretary have better luck?

Many thanks for the helpful replies.