This section explores COVID-19 related hospitalisations among the 6.2 million people with their first reported COVID-19 diagnosis during the Omicron period. In the first 3 years of the pandemic in Australia, most COVID-19 diagnoses (97%) occurred during the Omicron period.
Interpreting COVID-19 related hospitalisations
Data on hospital separations up to 30 June 2022 was available for 6 of the 8 states and territories (excludes Western Australia and Northern Territory) in Version 2.6 of the COVID-19 Register.
In this report, a standardised definition was used to report COVID-19 related hospitalisations. This is defined as a hospitalisation:
- with a first COVID-19 notification up to 14 days before or 2 days after the hospital admission date,
- that was not admitted and discharged on the same day to capture admissions related to more severe disease, and
- had COVID-19 recorded in the hospital record (with ICD-10-AM code of U07.1 or U07.2 as a principal or additional diagnosis).
Severe hospital outcomes are defined as any of the following during the hospital admission:
- having an intensive care unit (ICU) stay
- involving continuous ventilatory support (CVS)
- died in hospital.
Note, it is possible for a person to experience one or more severe outcomes (for example, had an ICU stay and then died in hospital).
A first COVID-19 diagnosis had to occur between 15 December 2021 and 1 July 2022 as this end date is the last possible notification date that meets the definition of a COVID-19 related hospitalisation. The small number of hospitalisations related to reinfections were excluded.
Remoteness area for hospitalisations refer to the usual place of residence of the patient.
To aid in interpreting findings, 95% confidence intervals are included to show the range of uncertainty around each estimate (that is, that 95 out of 100 times the estimate will fall between the upper and lower values). A wider confidence interval band means greater uncertainty. In this report, when confidence intervals of two different estimates do not overlap, the difference between estimates is likely to be statistically significant.
See Technical notes for further details.
Overall, 1.9% of people with their first reported COVID-19 diagnoses during the Omicron period had a COVID-19 related hospitalisation. Of these:
- almost 1 in 3 (30%) had an acute respiratory condition recorded as a principal or additional diagnosis in their admission (see Table A3)
- 5 days was the median length of stay in hospital
- Of those hospitalised, a small percentage experienced severe and/or fatal outcomes:
- 2.4% involved an ICU stay
- 0.8% were ventilated
- 2.2% died in hospital.
COVID-19 related hospitalisations among people with COVID-19 increased with age – from 1.5% of people under 20 to 12% of people aged 80 or over. The percentage was similar for males (1.8%) and females (1.9%) overall. However, from age 80 onwards, males were 1.3 times as likely to have a COVID-19 related hospitalisation than females (14% and 11%, respectively).
Males were also twice as likely to experience severe outcomes following hospitalisation compared to females (Figure 2). For example, 3.4% of males with a COVID-19 related hospitalisation were admitted to ICU compared to 1.7% of females.
