Up to 1 in 50 people admitted to hospital during England’s second covid-19 wave caught the coronavirus there. Are sufficient measures in place to prevent such infections as winter approaches this year?
By Clare Wilson
18 October 2023
Someone with covid-19 at the Royal Papworth Hospital in Cambridge, UK, in January 2021
Lynsey Addario/Getty Images
Cast your mind back – if you can bear it – to the end of 2020, when the UK and many other countries were in the throes of their worst surge of covid-19 deaths of the pandemic.
It was known that the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus was spreading within hospitals, weakening people who were already sick and sometimes killing them. There have been previous studies of the problem, but the most comprehensive analysis yet has confirmed that virus transmission was happening at an alarming scale.
The new study found that up to 1 in 50 people admitted to hospital during England’s second wave caught the coronavirus there. Some say this shows hospitals should be clamping down harder on the spread of covid-19 today.
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On the other hand, most people now have some immunity to the virus and many health bodies say covid-19 is no longer a public health emergency. So, should northern hemisphere countries be stepping up coronavirus precautions in hospitals as winter approaches?
The new study, by Ben Cooper at the University of Oxford and his colleagues, analysed covid-19 cases between June 2020 and March 2021 from 365 hospitals in England. People were classed as having definitely or probably caught the virus in hospital if they tested positive after being in hospital for more than seven days.
After adjusting the figures to take account of those who would have been missed by this approach, for instance because they were discharged before testing positive, the team calculated that between 1 and 2 per cent of people admitted to hospitals in England during this period caught the virus there. “That’s a horrible statistic,” says Tom Lawton at the Bradford Institute for Health Research, UK.