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Coronavirus Fact-Check #13: “ICUs are filled with the unvaccinated”

It’s become a common meme to refer to ICU’s being “filled” with the unvaccinated, but is there any truth to that?

A few days ago Dr Hillary Jones, whilst being interviewed on Lorraine Kelly, claimed:

90% of people in hospital are unvaccinated”.

Similarly, last week, Kevin Maguire claimed on Jeremy Vine’s show that:

The unvaccinated are filling hospital beds, they’re in ICUs taking up precious resources – there are hospital waiting lists going up because there are so many unvaccinated people in hospitals”

Television presenters and news headlines across the United Kingdom have commonly referred to hospitals being filled with unvaccinated covid19 patients.

As if it could ever be considered evidence of anything, an anonymous “doctor” wrote a piece for The Guardian, which he filled with nameless anecdotal evidence, and emotively headlined:

ICU is full of the unvaccinated – my patience with them is wearing thin

This claim is regularly used as an argument for vaccine mandates, and/or unvaxxed-only lockdowns.

But is it true?

In a word, no.

ICUs are not “full” of unvaccinated covid patients, they’re not even full of covid cases. In fact, they’re not even full at all.

As of last week, NHS England’s own bed statistics reported that England has 4330 available critical care beds, of which 894 (21%) are being used by Covid patients, 2608 (60%) non-Covid patients and 828 (19%) were empty.

So, England’s critical care beds are not even 90% full, let alone 90% full of unvaccinated covid patients.

But let’s be charitable and assume these people misspoke or communicated their point badly. Let’s assume they meant 90% of covid hospitalisations are unvaccinated.

That, at least, is true right? Wrong.

The actual number is 35.4%

According to the UK’s Health Security Agency data (page 31 of this document) 6639 patients were admitted to hospital “with Covid” in the weeks 44-47 of this year. Of those 6639, 2355 were unvaccinated.

So unvaccinated people do not even make up the majority of Covid cases, let alone the majority of ICU admissions in general.

So, even going by the official statistics – which we’ve previously shown are routinely inflated to make the “pandemic” appear frightening – the claim is incorrect.

And that doesn’t even account for the fact that, according to Public Health England, a “Covid hospitalisation” is anyone admitted to hospital for any reason within 28 days of a positive Covid test. This could include people who are admitted to hospital for something else and then happen to test positive while they are there.

We could also discuss the tiny number of hospital beds available in this country, which has more than halved since the 1980s, whilst the population has exploded in that time.

But that’s really an article for another day.

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Categories: Covid Factchecker, latest