Dear Mark 

COVID-19 Hospital Activity 

I am writing to commend you and your team on the improvement to the data on COVID-19 hospital activity that you have developed and published in response to user needs. 

In November 2020, we published an article about the data available on hospital capacity and occupancy during the pandemic. We asked for more granular data covering a wider range of reasons for people to be admitted to hospital. We felt this was important in order to understand hospital capacity and to understand how many people are in hospital because of COVID-19 illness and how many are in hospital for other reasons, but tested positive for COVID-19. 

For England, I am pleased to see the following data have been published: 

• The weekly COVID-19 hospital activity statistics include daily data on capacity and occupancy by patients who have neither tested positive nor are suffering from COVID-19. 
• A supplementary analysis for acute Trusts allows the distinction to be made between those who are in hospital being primarily treated for COVID-19 symptoms and those who have been admitted and also happen to have tested positive for COVID-19. 

The analysis is available at the bottom of the web page and we would urge you to make these supplementary statistics more prominent, perhaps by providing a brief commentary with some insight into what the data shows. 

Yours sincerely

Mary Gregory
Deputy Director for Regulation