Alaska’s COVID-19 hospitalizations have reached new all-time highs. This is what this number really reflects.

As Alaska hospitals face low staffing, limited capacity, and a health system in serious effort, the state has reported increasing records of hospitalizations for COVID-19.

But these measures are complicated. They include people who may have been admitted for something else and tested positive for the virus, but also omit others who have been hospitalized for COVID-19 for so long that they are no longer infectious.

All of this makes it harder to discern the true burden of health care facilities with a single number, Dr. Anne Zink, Alaska’s chief physician, said in an interview Friday.

“I don’t think from a state perspective we can say it’s like a real excess, we can’t say it’s an accounting excess,” Zink said. “We can say that this is the only data we can report because it is the only data we have.”

State hospitalization data also does not include emergency room visits, another way to quantify the burden on hospitals, as they are considered outpatient visits, Zink said.

The number of virus hospitalizations recorded on the state control panel comes from hospitals that are reported in a federal database and the information is extracted by state public health officials.

Speaking before the House Health and Social Services Committee last week, Zink told lawmakers that the total number of hospitalizations reported on the state’s COVID-19 control panel probably didn’t represent everyone sick with the virus in the U.S. Alaska hospitals.

“For someone, for example, who is in their thirties hospitalized, it can be infectious for the first 10 or 15 days,” Zink said. “But they may require a hospital stay of one month or two months. And so that means a continuous burden for the hospital that is not reflected in the overall numbers on the board.”

There may also be other patients not reflected on the board, Zink said. Some patients may begin to recover and then experience a complication, such as a heart attack or stroke, and instead will be admitted and treated for that complication, according to Zink. This will not always appear in state data.

When COVID-positive asymptomatic people are admitted to hospitals for other reasons, such as labor, these patients continue to work more for hospital staff and need more resources. Staff must be dressed and patients need single rooms.

Asymptomatic patients can also suffer from illnesses in the hospital, Zink said, and go from not seeing symptoms when they test positive to experiencing complications later.

Broadly speaking, health officials say, once a patient ceases to be positive for COVID-19, it is no longer counted in the total number of hospitalizations. However, they could still be in a hospital bed while symptoms persist, needing acute care and affecting ability.

But there is some variety in the way COVID-19 hospitalizations are reported.

According to responses from several Alaska hospitals this week, some report all COVID-19-related hospitalizations, while others only report active cases.

Alaska’s largest hospital, Providence Alaska Medical Center, only reports active cases of COVID-19 in the number of hospitalizations. This does not include other people who are no longer infectious with the disease, but who still need hospital care, according to Providence Alaska spokesman Mikal Canfield.

On Wednesday, 50 people were considered active COVID-19 patients in Providence, while another 22 were not included in the case count because they were not infectious and were considered “recovered,” Canfield wrote in an email.

“This does not necessarily indicate that patients are well, but it does indicate that these patients are no longer considered infectious,” he wrote.

Similarly, Fairbanks Memorial Hospital only reports active cases of COVID-19, which as of this week were 24 cases, while there were no hospitalized patients after the infectious period.

According to spokesman Alan Craft, the number of COVID-19 hospitalizations on the state dashboard is not necessarily an accurate representation of who may be hospitalized with the disease at Mat-Su Regional Hospital. This is because, similarly to the rest of the facility, patients who are in the hospital for longer stays due to COVID-19 may not appear in these figures after being reclassified.

At Alaska Native Medical Center, in general, any patient who tests positive for COVID-19 is reported as hospitalized, but can be removed from this account according to the symptoms and other guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Diseases, although they may still be hospitalized. Robert Onders, of the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium.

However, in Alaska Regional, in Anchorage, spokeswoman Kjerstin Lastufka said the positive COVID number includes all patients who need virus-related care until discharge.

“The number reported to the state includes both patients in the acute phase of care for COVID-19 and patients who are still recovering from COVID-19 (those who have passed the infectious period) but who remain hospitalized.” Lastufka said in a statement. e-mail.

Officials at Barteau Regional Hospital in Juneau said they reported new COVID-19 admissions within their infectious window and in some cases, depending on the severity of a case when they are admitted, this infectious window can extend up to 20 days.