'People feel it’s being manipulated': York Region no longer providing data on COVID-19 hospitalizations

Despite the critical situation due to skyrocketing numbers of hospitalized COVID-19 patients in our community and across the entire province, York Region will no longer be sharing information publicly about residents who are hospitalized. 

York Region Public Health removed all hospitalization-related data from its online dashboard “to alleviate confusion on accuracy of data” as of last night.

The decision to get out of the “fray” and “many complexities” around providing the data came on the heels of concerns raised yesterday by some members of regional council to medical officer of health Dr. Karim Kurji.

Whitchurch-Stouffville Mayor Iain Lovatt had urged “in the spirit of transparency” that total hospitalizations at Southlake Regional Health Centre, Mackenzie Health and Markham Stouffville Hospital be included on the dashboard, rather than only the number of York Region residents hospitalized. 

He noted the “bit of a variance” in the data on the dashboard that day, which indicated 28 York Region residents were hospitalized with COVID-19, while the region’s “full” hospitals were reporting a total of 268 COVID-19 patients (including non-residents).

“There will always be differences in opinion with respect to how you assemble hospital data,” Kurji said. “Our emphasis has been on York Region residents being hospitalized and following provincial guidance with respect to whether these individuals are regarded as COVID infectious or not.”

The hospitalization data provided by York Region's public health unit has often been misinterpreted as representing total hospitalizations, rather than the number of York Region residents only — whether in one of the region’s four hospitals or elsewhere in the province, Kurji said.

For instance, the number of hospitalizations indicated for Newmarket on the dashboard reflected the number of residents in a hospital with COVID-19, and was not an indication of the total number of COVID patients in Southlake.

“I think that people are looking to York Region Public Health as the voice of public health, of which, obviously, hospitals play a role in providing care… I think the responsibility is on us to represent the data the best way we can to the community because I think that’s where leaving it up for interpretation and other narratives is where we can find ourselves in the crosshairs of the whole narrative around COVID and reporting,” Lovatt told Kurji. 

Kurji stated the public health unit could not focus its stretched resources on attempting to provide additional data for hospitalizations as the region’s cases hit record-high numbers, adding it doesn’t even have access to data such as ICU capacity and patient transfers to other jurisdictions.

“We are very focused just now on getting the outbreak under control and our resources are extremely needed both with respect to case contact management (and) outbreak control... It’s not possible for us to deviate our resources to an area that we don’t think will assist us one little bit with respect to control of the outbreak.

“We work within a system where the hospitals are part of the health-care system, and so, if there are questions around hospital data, they are best addressed to the hospitals.”

Earlier this week, York Region Public Health made changes to the way that hospitalized patients with COVID-19 and variant cases are tracked, which caused significant reductions in the data, sparking concerns among members of the community who have been closely following the pace of the pandemic through data released by York Region Public Health and the Ontario Ministry of Health.

The local public health unit aligned its data tracking with the Ministry of Health’s latest definition of a resolved case — case data changes automatically in the system based on the number of days of infection, and is not based on when an individual has actually recovered — which significantly decreased the number of hospitalizations, as well as active cases in general, on York Region’s dashboard on April 21.

Previously, cases that were considered resolved at 24 days now  “auto resolve” at 10 days. If the case received ICU-level care, the case is considered automatically resolved after 20 days.

On April 21, the number of York Region residents being tracked as hospitalized anywhere in the province dropped from 78 to 28, and hospitalized variant cases dropped from 68 to 17. Also, active variant cases on the dashboard dropped from 4,675 to 3,053 overnight. York Region’s resolved cases jumped from 88 per cent of its total cases to 92 per cent.

Newmarket’s active variant cases dropped from 175 to 104 as a result of the changed definition, while overall resolved cases moved from 87 per cent to 90 per cent in a day. 

Critical Care Service Ontario, a provincial government agency that provides daily reports to hospitals and health agencies, had earlier raised concerns about the distorted perception given by the province’s lower daily numbers of hospitalizations compared to the actual number of hospitalizations.

Under the ministry’s definition, patients admitted to hospitals and ICUs with COVID-19 but who are no longer positive are considered recovered even if they remain hospitalized.

At council yesterday, Georgina Mayor Margaret Quirk stated many residents are confused about the seemingly contradictory data being presented to them.

“You could still be in hospital, still be dealing with a COVID issue, but be counted as resolved. And I think that’s where one of the concerns is, that there are still a lot of people in (Southlake) — York Region residents and non York Region residents — dealing with COVID issues but they may be deemed to have been resolved and I think that’s where some of the confusion is,” Quirk said.

“And people feel it’s being manipulated from one end of the spectrum to the other end of the spectrum, feeling that we’re overreporting cases on one end and (on) the other end, thinking we’re underreporting hospitalizations.”

Kurji then indicated hospitalization data should be removed from the public dashboard to eliminate the confusion and misinterpretation.

“The hospitalization data is not necessarily particularly useful to us in York Region (Public Health), we get our feedback from the three (hospital) CEOs,” Kurji said. “And basically they are stretched at this point. Hospital capacities are very stretched, no question about that.

“Beyond that, if somebody really wants hospitalization data...I would rather leave the area of reporting the hospitalizations to the hospitals.”

Southlake, Mackenzie Health and Markham Stouffville Hospital report their own data for hospitalized cases to the Ministry of Health, including ICU patients. For the most up-to-date hospital data, including all individuals hospitalized at each site, visit the hospital websites directly, the public health unit advises.