> Early data from Scotland indicated that delta-infected Covid patients were 1.8 times more likely to be hospitalized than those with an alpha infection. Other U.K. data support the increased risk of hospitalization but do not provide clear evidence that delta patients experience more severe illness once in the hospital.
How do hospitals identify individual patients infected by Alpha, Delta or other variant?
Do they perform genetic sequencing of a virus sample from each patient, to determine what mutations are present? If they are doing statistical sampling, what percentage of patients are being sampled for variant identification?
It would helpful to have variant-specific numbers of cases and deaths added to national data, so that accurate graphs can be drawn for each variant. More granular data would support data analytics of local, variant-specific, policy interventions, to evaluate cause-effect on local health metrics.