Hospitalisations for non-covid reasons in NZ- an alarming signal
Are New Zealand's hospitals full because of Covid-19 Vaccine reactions and long-term side effects?
In early July the Ministry of Health (NZ) changed they way it reported hospitalisations. Until that point, anyone with a positive C-19 test result within the 28 days prior to hospitalisation (or 5 days after) was counted as a Covid hospitalisation. So, if you crashed your motorbike, or broke your arm playing footy, and just happened to have had a positive test 4 weeks prior, or caught Covid in hospital, you were added to the count. But after July 6-7 only those who are hospitalised directly because of Covid, or where Covid was a contributing factor, are now counted as Covid hospitalisations. Obviously this is a far more accurate reflection of reality, albeit the ‘contributing factor’ part still leaves a fair amount of wiggle room in the data.
The result of this change was an overnight reduction in the reported number of hospitalisations which appeared on the 8th July report. The table below reflects this change.
(Source: COVID-19: Case demographics | Ministry of Health NZ – past pages can be accessed on the way-back machine here)
Notice that while all categories reduced, the difference is not proportional. The various vaccinated groups reduced by a significant amount more than the unvaccinated. This suggests a possible excess hospitalisation rate amongst the vaccinated. We know that hospitals have been overwhelmed with non-covid patients so is there a relationship to the Covid-19 shots? It seems at least plausible.
It would be easy to check this hypothesis if the MoH recorded vaccination status for all hospitalised people, but they don’t (I asked). To check if there is anything more to this signal we only have the Covid related data that the MoH does publish to work with.
First we need to check the population size of each group (cohort) so we can compare based on population size. The table below establishes the average population size for each cohort (refer to COVID-19: Vaccine data | Ministry of Health NZ – past pages can be accessed on the way-back machine here)
Having established the population sizes we next calculate the number of people in each cohort who caught Covid over the time period
Note the very low case rate for the unvaccinated. Unless the vaccine makes one more prone to infection, there is clearly something wrong with this. I believe it is because unvaccinated are less likely to report an infection, but to what degree? I do not know. But I will return to the case rate for the unvaccinated shortly to see how a more realistic assessment might affect the outcome.
Putting the whole lot together:
We see significant increases for the 1 dose and 2 dose but not for the Boosted. However, if we re-visit the case rate and replace the MoH reported figure with a more realistic figure matching the case rate of the vaccinated (it’s probably even higher), this is the result:
The more realistic the unvaccinated case rate is, the worse the ratio of non-covid hospitalisations for the vaccinated.
Caution is required before jumping to conclusions. There are other confounding factors that must be accounted for and for which the MoH is not collecting or publishing data sufficient to enable inclusion in the calculation. Some confounders, like the case classification slide (assigning hospitalisation occuring <7 days from a vaccination to the previous vaccination status), and case rates, mentioned above would tend to increase the effect. Others, like age stratification, would tend to reduce this effect- perhaps significantly.
Furthermore, this is just a snapshot, representing only those who are hospitalised with a positive covid test result which is only about 1% of all those who are hospitalised. Should this figure, even if close to reality, be extrapolated to the other 99%?
This is only a signal, but a signal that is nonetheless alarming. Of the total 6252 people hospitalised for non-covid reasons and removed from the MoH count, a significant number, in the thousands, would not have been there but for the vaccine. This alone demands further, immediate investigation because if we do extrapolate to the entire population, even at only at a small fraction of this rate, we would be talking an excess hospitalisation far exceeding the number saved by vaccination.