Painting a portrait

How do COVID-19 admissions evolve over time?

‘Protect the NHS’ is the appeal from the UK government, ordering people to stay at home. Pressure on healthcare services is important to understand during a pandemic.

This is part of the government campaign. (Image: Public Health England)

How do COVID-19 admissions and patient levels change over time?

Evolving over time

We can plot COVID-19 admissions and COVID-19 patients in hospitals in England. NHS England use the following definitions:

• COVID-19 admission: admissions with positive tests plus in-patient diagnoses. For hospital admissions, the person must have a positive SARS-CoV-2 test in the prior 14 days. NHS England counts in-patient diagnoses against the day before their diagnosis.
• COVID-19 patients (or hospital cases): the number of confirmed COVID-19 patients in hospital at 8am. This measure includes all hospitals.

Prof Johnson (Bristol) produces graphs showing admissions and patients over time.

Each dot represents a day. (Image: Twitter/BristOliver)

Using R, we are going to produce a similar graph using ggplot2.

Straight from the API