I will point out that this is again a preliminary study that has not been published. The authors admit that they have no evidence that the increase was due to covid. Specific criticisms given are
they needed to correlate the increase with other hospitals in China not an earlier time.
They also had no data from prior years that would control better for a possible covid outbreak.
And this guy puts the biggest problem with the conclusion.
Keith Neal, emeritus professor of the epidemiology of infectious diseases at the University of Nottingham, pointed out that one of the two hospitals in the study was the Children’s hospital of Wuhan, described in the paper as “the largest paediatric hospital in Hubei”. But relatively few children have been hospitalised with Covid-19.
“The comment that children’s hospitals were affected … suggests this probably was not Covid-19,” he said. It would be interesting to see if they can come up with any other data that would point to covid other than another factor.
If anyone sees the final published version of this study please post here. I would like to see the paper after peer review.