TORONTO -- Ontario is now providing a more accurate picture of how many people sickened by COVID-19 are ending up in intensive care units, by including in the daily counts patients who are still requiring care in ICUs, but are no longer testing positive.
Up until now, patients who eventually tested negative—but were still in the ICU due to COVID-19 complications—were taken out of the province’s reported daily total. This resulted in a lower reported number of patients who were actually still in the ICU due to the virus.
With the newly updated numbers, there are an additional 27 patients being reported in intensive care.
“You have a significant amount of people who were staying in the ICU with COVID for so long that they actually stopped testing positive for the virus, but the virus has done such a number on their body that they still require critical care,” Jean-Paul Soucy, infectious disease epidemiologist and PhD student at the University of Toronto, told CTVNews.ca.
“I think we need to make those true ICU numbers, the true number of people who are in the ICU and standing with complications of COVID-19, as visible as possible.”
Soucy explained that the previous method of reporting the numbers could help control the virus internally, but was not helping the public understand the actual number of people who were currently in the ICU.
“They are useful from an infection control standpoint – this has implications on how these people are treated in the healthcare system in terms of precaution – but in terms of what the public actually cares about, it’s how many people are critically ill due to complications from COVID-19.”
Through the Ontario Open Data Catalogue, Ontarians can now track the total number of patients who are in the ICU due to COVID-19, patients who are in the ICU and are testing positive, and patients who are in the ICU because of COVID-19 complications but are testing negative.
