By NICK GOSNELL
Hutch Post
HUTCHINSON, Kan. — With roughly six months of numbers to go on, Hutchinson Regional Medical Center says for their population, the number of admitted patients with a COVID-19 diagnosis is dead even by gender.
"If you include Q1, the number was actually 70 and 70, equal," said Chuck Welch with the hospital.
The majority of patients were hospitalized because COVID-19 made something else they had worse, not because of COVID-19 itself.
"We saw 39 patients of the 140 that came in with a primary diagnosis of COVID," Welch said. "The rest of them, their principal diagnosis was something else and it also turned out that they had COVID."
The hospital did not release information on length of stay, because if someone had that information, they could likely figure out who an individual was that was admitted and there are legal ramifications if that were possible.
"The difficulty with identifying length of stay is that length of stay with this disease is so specific to the person," Welch said. "It depends on the comorbidities. It depends on the other things they had going on with them at the time."
The most patients have come in July, August and the first half of September. The average age of females admitted was 60 years old. Average age of males admitted was 57.