New York state is now asking hospitals to provide more information about patients admitted for COVID-19, like where they live and how they commute, in an effort to study trends on who’s most affected by the disease and respond to those patterns with new actions.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Friday that he’ll be speaking with hospital leaders about the request, which the state will use to form a more targeted response to the disease.
As of Friday, approximately 1,000 people were still being admitted to the hospital with COVID-19 on average statewide, Cuomo said. That number hasn’t budged in four days.
“We need more specific information to have a specific battle plan,” Cuomo said. “Let’s get more specific information from the hospital to come up with a strategy that’s more tailored to the reduction of these 1,000 cases per day.”
It’s the first time the state is seeking to gather that information from hospitals, many of which were overburdened with COVID-19 patients in New York City in early April. The statewide number of hospitalizations has since gone down every day for nearly three weeks.
Cuomo defended the state’s choice not to request more specific data from hospitals until now, saying those facilities didn’t have the capacity to compile the information at the peak of the pandemic in New York.
Even now, he said, the request will be a burden for hospitals.
“You had emergency rooms that were overwhelmed, you had administrators that were overwhelmed,” Cuomo said. “To get this level of granular detail on people walking to the door, and get it to us on a nightly basis, this is going to be a significant administrative burden on them.”
New York doesn’t publicly report COVID-19 data per facility, instead opting to publish it by county. That data includes the county where a patient died, versus where they lived. Sometimes that’s different, depending on where the person is treated.
The state also reports the number of positive COVID-19 tests per county, though local health departments have more granular information on hospitalizations.
What’s missing from the state’s data, Cuomo said, are details about how the patient may have contracted the disease, and where they may have spread it. That’s why they’re asking for information about how the patient travels, and where they live.
That data, under Cuomo’s plan, would be collected from every person who’s hospitalized with COVID-19. It’s unclear when the collection would start, or if each hospital will have the capacity to do it.
The share of hospitalizations, according to Cuomo, appear to still be concentrated in areas of New York City. Both Manhattan and Brooklyn each share about 17% of the state’s hospitalizations, with the Bronx close behind.
As of Thursday, the latest data available, 10,993 people were still hospitalized statewide for the disease, which is a decrease of 605 over Wednesday. Of those, 3,033 were in the intensive care unit, also a dip from Wednesday’s data.
Another 289 people died from the disease Thursday, bringing the statewide total since the start of the pandemic to 18,563. That doesn’t include probable, unconfirmed deaths.
The total number of people who’ve tested positive for COVID-19 in New York reached 308,314 Thursday.
