St. Patrick's celebrations

[jeffster]

I was able to find some local ED visit data by week for all causes.
 
The data captured is designed for tracking the flu, so it only available from September to April, but it does have a denominator for total number of ED visits. As a result I was only able to compare St Patrick’s Day to Oktoberfest, but not to BluesFest or RibFest. It also didn’t have a numerator specific to alcohol toxicity so all cause visits will have be a proxy.
 
What I found for 2018 was that during the week of St Patrick’s day ED visits went up nearly 30%, and during Oktoberfest they were essentially unchanged.
 
For the two weeks prior to St Patrick’s day there were 2,177 (Feb 25-Mar 03) and 2,191 (Mar 04-Mar 10) ED visits or an average of 2,184 per week.
 
The week of St Patrick’s day (Mar 11-Mar 17), which also happened to be March Break when ED visits should be lower with many people out of town, had 2,781 ED visits; or more than 27% higher than the previous two weeks’ average.
 
If you were to get data by day-by-day you would see even greater differences (i.e. a regular Saturday in March vs. the Saturday of St. Patrick’s day) because the single day peak visits due to St. Patrick’s day is being averaged out over 7 days.
 
Also, if you were to narrow the counts to only visits for alcohol toxicity I suspect that the per cent change for St Patrick’s day would be even greater.
 
Compare that to Oktoberfest (Oct 5-13). For the two weeks prior to Oktoberfest, which included a long weekend when ED’s are usually busier than usual because clinics and doctor’s offices are closed for the holiday, had 3,505 (Sep 16-22) and 3,425 (Sep 23-29) ED visits respectively; an average of 3,465 ED visits per week. The two weeks of Oktoberfest had 3,442 (Sep 30-Oct-6) and 3,468 (Oct 7-13) ED visits; an average of 3,455 ED visits. That’s a decrease of 0.3% in total ED visits.

So the costs for the St. Paddy's party is substantially higher than anyone has suggested so far. The only number I had was policing being over $500,000...the costs in the hospital must be extraordinary. This isn't good because it puts so many other people at risk due to staffing shortages.

If anything, the City of Waterloo and Laurier probably should spend a few million dollars every year to set up an onsite fully staffed hospital to deal with the patrons of the St. Paddy's event.