Figure 1

Daily expected risk of death by blood culture status. The daily hazard of death was calculated for each person using a validated predictive model that captured daily values of important, patient-level covariates [22]. Within each group (no blood culture [red], negative blood culture [grey], positive blood culture [blue]), these were summed and standardized to 1000 population (vertical axis). The horizontal axis displays the hospital day relative to the first blood culture; for patients with no blood culture, the hospitalization midpoint was used as the reference. The dip in the ‘no blood culture’ group is due to increased prevalence at zero time of short stay admissions (which have the lowest expected risk of death).