Correction... It's a Only A Massive Covid hospitalisation rate for under 5s ...
Nothing to see here... The NZ government doesn't care
After much ado, I got a follow-up Official Info Request follow up on the under 10 hospitalisation data (see my previous post).
I asked for all 9 months to be totaled in an effort to avoid that annoying ‘perturbation’ which they claim is necessary for the sake of anonymity (it’s not, but I give up!). The Ministry of Health (MoH) had the data (they gave me the first OIA response) but it seems they don’t know how to add it together so they passed it on to Te Whatu Ora (TWO), the newly formed nationwide hospital board to add up for them.
Here’s the result:
In the highlighted red box you can see the number of hospitalisations from the previous OIA for Unvaccinated and One dose, but it turns out there are only 27 fully vaccinated cases.
What happened to the 1800 that were seemingly vaccinated cases from the previous OIA? The answer appears to be that the cases returned were for 5-9 year olds, but the totals were for 0-9 year olds. There were 1773 covid hospitalisations in the under 5s… there they are in the last row of table 2. It seems the MoH can’t do a SQL search properly.
Given the amount of shenanagins the MoH/TWO went through, and a whole bunch of discrepancies in the data, ie:
… I am suspicious. But that said, this latest data is at least plausible so I’m somewhat happy to accept it at face value.
What remains is a huge question:
Why is the hospitalisation rate among the under 5’s so high?
All the data/literature so far points to increasing resilience to Covid the younger a person is. We even know why: lack of Ace2 receptors in young people. The data on the previous OIA confirms this with decreasing hospitalisation rates as the cohorts get younger, but then you get to the under 5s and boom, the rate rockets up!
If we compare to other age groups we can see than the under 5s are worse than everyone under 60.
Is this for real, or are these hospitalisations being mis-classified?
Is there something in the water?
Is it because their mums are vaxxed?
The MoH does not seem to care. Maybe that is because the under 5s are all unvaxxed and having this amount of hospitalisations to put in the unvaxxed bucket helps make their vax figures look good since it more than doubles the total of unvaxxed hospitalisations: