Nearly half the people hospitalized with COVID-19 at a major Florida hospital system were admitted due to “non-COVID reasons.”
Jackson Health System, in Miami-Dade County, also tweeted Monday morning that nearly 80% of those hospitalized with COVID-19 were unvaccinated.
“Jackson Health System hospitals currently have 439 patients who have tested positive for COVID-19. Of those, 220 patients — or 50% — are admitted to the hospital primarily for non-COVID reasons,” the tweet said.
“Of the 439, 96 are vaccinated; 46 of whom are immunocompromised transplant patients.”
Govs. Ron DeSantis, R-Fla., and Kathy Hochul, D-N.Y., in separate press conferences on Monday, said that cases in which COVID-19 is a secondary ailment could comprise a large proportion of hospitalizations in their states.
“Beginning tomorrow, we’re going to be asking all hospitals to break out for us how many people are being hospitalized because of COVID symptoms [and] how many people … happen to be testing positive,” Hochul said in a press conference at the State University at Rochester.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the White House chief medical adviser, has said that COVID-19 hospitalization data should be taken with a grain of salt, Business Insider reported.
On Wednesday, Fauci said that some children would be admitted for “a broken leg, or appendicitis, or something like that,” and later turn out to have COVID-19.
Such hospitalizations made up about a third of the 8,321 COVID-19-positive cases in England on Dec. 28, according to data from the National Health Service.
Mark Kline, senior vice president of Children’s Hospital New Orleans, tweeted Monday that nearly 80% of children at six hospitals last summer were hospitalized “not just with, but because of COVID.”
He tweeted that “78% of 915 kids hospitalized last summer with COVID at 6 children’s hospitals were there not just with, but because of COVID; 1.5% (11/713) died, a death rate similar to some types of pediatric open-heart surgery. COVID in kids is not harmless. Let’s stop pretending it is.”
David Strain, a senior clinical lecturer at the University of Exeter medical school, told The Guardian that having COVID also can worsen other problems.
“We [have] seen many other people who have been otherwise stable [with] chronic diseases such as heart failure, ulcerative colitis etc that caught COVID and had a rapid deterioration,” Strain told The Guardian.
“Although they are regarded as ‘incidental COVID’, this sudden deterioration in otherwise stable disease can be attributed to the virus.”
