Covid-19 Hospital admissions (FOI)

Request

Please provide figures for every calendar month since 1 January 2020:

A

The number of individuals in Jersey admitted to hospital for treatment for Covid-19, as defined under Article 1 Covid-19 (Enabling Provisions) (Jersey) Law 2020.

B

The number of individuals identified as a ‘direct contact’ through contact tracing and the ‘Covid Alert app’ within the workplaces that are subject to the Covid-19 (Workplace Restrictions) (Jersey) Order 2020 (the “Order”), broken down by calendar month and by the following workplaces:

a) workplaces (other than schools) that permit people to engage in sport or physical exercise indoors, as defined under Article 2(1)(a) of the Order

b) jacuzzis, plunge pools, steam rooms, saunas, Turkish baths, and any workplace similar to any of those facilities as defined under Article 2(1)(b) of the Order

c) soft play centres; as defined under Article 2(1)(c) of the Order

d) squash courts as defined under Article 2(1)(e) of the Order

e) food and drink premises as defined under Article 3(3) of the Order; and

f) workplaces specified in Article 3(1A) of the Order

Response

A

Data is available in relation to numbers of individuals in hospital that have tested positive for Covid. However, numbers of individuals specifically being treated for COVID-19, as defined under Article 1 Covid-19 Enabling Provisions) (Jersey) Law 2020 is not data that is collected.

B

Between 3 March and 23 December, there were 998 positive cases where contact tracing was the reason for swabbing.

Assuming an average of 10 minutes of case note reading per case in order to identify if any workplaces mentioned in the request were implicated and categorise this, this would take roughly 166 hours. This assumes the case notes recorded by the contact tracing team include details required to answer this Freedom of Information request. If further interviewing is required in order to ascertain where transmission for each individual case occurred, (roughly five hours per case) then this would take just under 5,000 hours to complete for all cases.

Essentially, we don’t hold the information in a format suitable to analyse quickly and it would take more than 12.5 hours to get it into that format and provide an accurate response.

Article applied

Article 16 A scheduled public authority may refuse to supply information if cost excessive

(1) A scheduled public authority that has been requested to supply information may refuse to supply the information if it estimates that the cost of doing so would exceed an amount determined in the manner prescribed by Regulations.

Regulation 2 (1) of the Freedom of Information (Costs) (Jersey) Regulations 2014 allows an authority to refuse a request for information where the estimated cost of dealing with the request would exceed the specified amount of the cost limit of £500. This is the estimated cost of one person spending 12.5 working hours in determining whether the department holds the information, locating, retrieving and extracting the information.