Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how many people have contracted covid-19 as in-patients in hospitals in England, on each day since 1 January 2020.
We do not yet have a methodology to differentiate between cases contracted in hospital and cases in which the patient already had the condition when admitted. Our data sources do not differentiate between:
- Cases admitted as suspected COVID-19 and subsequently confirmed as COVID-19; and
- Cases admitted as non COVID-19 but subsequently contracting COVID-19 in hospital.
NHS Digital and NHS England and NHS Improvement are using a variety of data sources to explore the extent to which they can provide this information through data linkage in future.