Looking at ED Visits vs. Vaccinations
Parsing COVID and Non-COVID ED Visits
The Bad Cat asks the question of why ERs seem to be very busy in the US with patients coming in for non-COVID related causes. He also looks at some interesting data in the UK that might indicate rises in “other” health issues as vaccinations increased. The data in the US is not nearly as good as the UK, but there may be some signals available in the data provided on ED visits and vaccinations that start to paint a picture.
Data Used
COVID-19 Reported Patient Impact and Hospital Capacity by Facility from HealthData.gov
The hospital data includes weekly numbers for COVID ED Visits and All ED Visits. Subtracting the former from the latter provides Non-COVID ED Visits (recognizing the classification will not be perfect). From the vaccination data, we will focus on number of folks with a 1st shot. We could easily look at fully vaccinated as well. The picture looks largely the same, with the curve simply shifted to the right a bit.
Plots below are at the state level. The top half of the charts show non-COVID ED visits over time (red line) vs. a running total of the people who have had at least one shot administered (green line). The bottom half of the chart shows COVID ED Visits for the same time frame.
Using the NYT list of states with the most & least percentage of people with at least one shot, five high vaccine states and five low vaccine states are shown below.
High Vaccine States
Low Vaccine States
Comments
This is the mother of all limitations … The hospital data does not include prior years and your humble author knows nothing about typical year emergency room visits. If any readers can point me to data, or expert knowledge on this, please do. All states show rising non-COVID ED visits from February through July (or thereabouts). This may be the case every year. Therefore this analysis is incomplete. Another explanation could be that as people are vaccinated, they feel more comfortable going to an ER now whereas they avoided the ER out of concern of catching COVID prior to receiving the vaccine.
*** Published a follow up looking for clues on this limitation
With those limitations on the table, the correlation (again, correlation does not mean causation) between the population of people vaccinated and the rise in non-COVID ER visits is clear. Making this perhaps more persuasive is the correlation is not just in the rise of both metrics, but in that they both seem to level in synch as well (typically towards end of July). At the very least, this deserves more investigation if one of the other possible explanations above is not clearly dominant. Also note that the COVID-ED visits seem to follow no predictable pattern with regards to the population vaccinated.
*** Published a dashboard for anyone who wants to look at a Region or State.
Is sex available? Would be interesting to see if the emergency room visits were more males, just as covid/vaccine injury affect men more than women.