During the Covid-19 outbreak of early 2020 I started working on some graphs with data about the NYC emergency department case counts. This page is a collection of the different aspects of that project: syndromic surveillance, Covid-19, data resources, initial charts, caveats. If you have questions please feel free to leave a comment below, I read and respond to comments on this site.
These pages focus on syndromic surveillance and Covid-19:
- Current Graph: Syndromic Surveillance Covid-19 Graph (NYC)
- Initial Graph: Could we use Influenza-like Illness (ILI) syndromic surveillance to spot emergence of Covid-19?
- Graph: What is the increased burden in the NYC ER that we see via ILI syndromic surveillance?
- Graph: Do we see similar patterns in NYC Respiratory ER visits?
- Background resources and additional projects related to syndromic surveillance and the human experience of Covid-19 in the medical workplace.
- Loadband: a pattern for indicating work load, was conceived of as a way to visualize comparisons between emergency department workloads from different time periods.
- A short view at the Texas Covid-19 outbreak of mid-2020 noting increased time between hospitalization and death from Covid as well improved mortality vs hospitalization.
- Caveats. It is important to read the ways in which all of this should be taken with a grain of salt.
Using syndromic surveillance, Covid-19 burdens on NYC emergency departments may be visible, why do we care?
The concern with Covid-19 or any pandemic is that it will overwhelm a health system. Once a health system is overwhelmed then people die not only from the pandemic illness. They also die because dealing with the pandemic takes up all of the available beds, equipment, and personnel.
If you get in a car accident but all of the ICU beds are taken up with pandemic illness patients your chances of dying increase. Or if you are in need of pediatric ICU but one of the Drs in the unit is infected, now the unit is quarantined and this will effect the level of your medical care. Or if the emergency department is crowded with worried people who are not ill and you arrive with a broken foot your treatment might be delayed due to heavier administrative burden.
With Covid-19 we don’t have much insight into how prevalent it is in NYC. This is because we have been unable to access testing in a significant way. As a result, we aren’t sure how intense the wave of illness will be. The examples of Italy, South Korea, and China suggest that the wave of illness will be quite intense.