Nearly Half of Coronavirus Patients in NY Hospitals Admitted for Other Reasons

Nearly half of hospitalized coronavirus patients in New York were admitted for issues other than the virus itself, data released Friday revealed.

According to reports, 43 percent of the estimated 11,500 coronavirus-positive hospitalizations in the state were admitted for reasons other than the Chinese coronavirus itself. That number is even higher in New York City, which reported that over half– 51 percent — of hospitalized coronavirus patients were “classified as ‘with’ COVID, as opposed to [hospitalized] ‘for’ the virus,” according to the Daily Mail:

In patients ‘with’ COVID, they were hospitalized for unrelated reasons, such as injuries in a car crash, but tested positive for the virus on the routine screening administered to all new patients and were subsequently reclassified as COVID admissions.

On Friday, for the second consecutive day, New York State saw its highest death toll from COVID-19 since the beginning of vaccinations and while things aren’t as dire as during the pandemic’s peak, cases continue to go up.

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) made the announcement on Friday, explaining her desire to “drill down into those numbers.”

“And I have two days’ metrics right now, and looking at just the 4th of January, we realized that 39 percent of the people are hospitalized with non-COVID related reasons and checking in yesterday’s number, that number was actually 42 percent,” she said before pointing to variations in the state, including New York City, which is “about 50/50.”

Let’s look at upstate, Central New York places like that where 79 percent are admitted due to real COVID. And if they’re sick enough from COVID that they have to be hospitalized versus a 21 percent who happened to be there for another reason and test positive. So that’s a very interesting snapshot of what’s going on across the state and even Central New York. But what a variation we’re seeing there between Central New York and the city.

We also know that 37 percent of positive cases overall were asymptomatic. And that’s something we’re going to talk about right now. And I want to get a little more clarity on that and what that means to someone who’s in the field, who’s actually dealing with this day to day and put it in perspective. Again, I want people to understand this is still a pandemic. The number of cases and hospitalizations are still rising. But let’s look in the context of someone who actually runs the hospital.

According to the New York Times’ coronavirus data tracker, blue, pro-mandate New York reported the second highest daily average of coronavirus cases per capita — 413 cases per 100,000 people — an increase of 216 percent over the last 14 days. 

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