From American Economic Journal: Economic Policy about the effects of ransomware on patients: ↬Tyler Cowen
Ransomware attacks decrease hospital volume by 17–24 percent during the initial attack week, with recovery occurring within 3 weeks. Among patients already admitted to the hospital when a ransomware attack begins, in-hospital mortality increases by 34–38 percent.
The implication is that the computer systems being down has a huge detrimental effect on patient outcomes. What the abstract doesn’t get into — and I don’t have access to the full article — is how they calculated the in-hospital mortality among the already admitted patients. Many of them will have been discharged early or transferred to other hospitals if stable enough, decreasing the denominator and overestimating mortality. At least I hope that’s the case!