Am American, not UK, but have worked in hospitals and surrounded by family working in hospitals during the pandemic. This is a grey area here, because people d

Am American, not UK, but have worked in hospitals and surrounded by family working in hospitals during the pandemic. This is a grey area here, because people don't always "come in because of COVID," they come in for symptom X, which might be exacerbated or caused by COVID. If someone has a set of chronic diseases, sure they have that, but the question is "why did they come into the ED today?" The answer to that is sometimes COVID even though they didn't know it. How this looks on a hospital chart is really fuzzy because it depends on all kinds of things; ICD coding can be ambiguous. There's also been some cases of COVID contracted in the hospital (the ones I have person familiarity with), but that is much less rare, and rarer as the year has gone on. There are also cases of people coming in for reasons unrelated to COVID, and finding out they were positive just coincidentally. There's also cases where it's really unclear.