Covid-19 cases in Europe: Database enables an exact daily update of patients being treated in hospitals and intensive care

It is important during the Covid-pandemic to be able to monitor the number of (new) infections and to limit its increase in order to prevent an overburdening of the health system. In order to measure and predict the number of patients treated in hospitals, particularly in intensive care, and how many the system is able to treat, good data is required concerning both the probability of admission to hospital and the length of stay, both in Germany and other countries. 

The Department of Health Care Management at TU Berlin, led by Prof. Dr. med. Reinhard Busse, has developed a database to provide information regarding the absolute and percentage numbers of patients in hospitals and intensive care. At the moment, data is available for 15 European countries. The data is provided by health ministries, national public health authorities and intensive care associations. 

The data base reveals that at the beginning of April, more than 22,000 patients with Covid-19 had been treated in intensive care in these 15 countries, with more than 6000 in both Spain and France and 4000 in Italy. This is twice the number compared with the preceding week. According to Reinhard Busse, the big differences in the percentages of positively tested persons in intensive care (ranging from 2 percent in Austria, and 3 percent in Germany and Portugal to 8 percent in the Netherlands and almost 11 percent in France) is not only attributable to the different stages of development of the epidemic in the various countries, but also, and in particular, to the total number of people tested. In those countries with little testing, the percentages of patients among those testing positive requiring hospital treatment is relatively high (more than 50 percent in Spain and over 40 percent in France), while in Germany it is “only” 10 percent.

This is the only database of its kind in Europe and is part of the Department of Health Care Management´s efforts to make data and facts available to national health ministries to enable better evidence-based health policies.

Reinhard Busse and the Department of Health Care Management have also been significantly involved in developing the European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies´ website https://www.covid19healthsystem.org/ [1]. This provides bodies such as the World Health Organization a comparison of approaches to prevention and testing in European countries. Information is currently available for 18 countries.