in the Daily Mail yesterday:

Thousands of ‘probable’ cases of Covid caught in hospitals in NHS England have been excluded from official figures.  Health officials calculating the rate of cases in hospital settings omitted instances where patients contracted coronavirus between seven and 14 days after admission – despite the fact the virus has an incubation period of up to six days in 95 per cent of cases. This practice goes directly against official advice to staff to categorised these cases as ‘hospital onset’ infections, and allowed NHS England to claim that its ‘nosocomial rates – referring to Covid patients infected in hospital – are down to as little as 7.7 per cent.

In NHS Scotland the most recent figures, for week-ending 27th December put the definite hospital onset figure at 1.9% and the probable rate at 0.4%.

https://beta.isdscotland.org/find-publications-and-data/population-health/covid-19/hospital-onset-covid-19-cases-in-scotland/

So, the rate in England of hospital-acquired Covid infection is between 3 and 4 times higher even with these fiddled figures.

Back in October, the Centre for Evidence-based Medicine at Oxford put the rate at between 18% and 23%.

I contacted the researchers recently and asked for a more recent update. They said they would be updating but have not published anything newer.

BBC Scotland have not covered the story.

The Ongoing Problem of UK Hospital Acquired Infections