Concerning trends in Ambulance call-out data for England - Cardiac and Respiratory Arrest
Yesterday I posted about hospital consultant data and finished with a teaser about how it was odd that there was no change in the cardiology data. Today I’ll explain why.
One of the useful sets of data provided by the NHS is on ambulance call out rates by syndrome category; one of the details in each report is the number of calls related to cardiac or respiratory arrest. I’ve plotted these data for the period from mid 2018 to November 2021:
It is clear from the graph that there has been a significant increase in ambulance call-outs for cardiac and respiratory arrest since the start of 2019 — from an average of around 275 calls per day for the first half of 2019 to approximately 350 per day over the last few months, an increase of approximately 25%.
Of course, these data are for cardiac and respiratory arrest, so it might be that all the increase has been in respiratory arrest — nevertheless, the lack of any change in hospital cardiology consultant ‘episodes’ is surprising.
There is actually some other rather interesting data in this chart, which I think is worth going through:
On the right of the graph I’ve overlaid an additional graph (in green) showing the percentage vaccinated with their second dose. After last winter’s covid wave the ambulance call-out rate rapidly fell to near the pre-covid average (around 275 calls per day), however, from last spring the rate of calls associated with cardiac or respiratory arrest has increased (with a small peak superimposed for the summer ‘Delta’ wave) to a rate significantly higher than seen after the spring 2020 covid wave. This increase appears to correlate with the vaccination rate in the population. I’d note that correlation doesn’t necessarily equal causation, however, the fact that there is correlation would suggest that research is required to identify is there is a causal relationship between cardiac or respiratory arrest and the covid vaccinations.
Also, there is clearly a well defined increase in cardiac or respiratory arrest call-outs during each covid wave — But also note that increase in call-outs in December 2019. Is this a sign that covid was present in the UK and causing problems way before it was officially identified in January 2020?