STUDY
Presenting Characteristics, Comorbidities, and Outcomes Among 5700 Patients Hospitalized With COVID-19 in the New York City Area
Findings
In this case series that included 5700 patients hospitalized with COVID-19 in the New York City area, the most common comorbidities were hypertension, obesity, and diabetes. Among patients who were discharged or died (n=2634), 14.2% were treated in the intensive care unit, 12.2% received invasive mechanical ventilation, 3.2% were treated with kidney replacement therapy, and 21% died.
Meaning
This study provides characteristics and early outcomes of patients hospitalized with COVID-19 in the New York City area.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2765184
TREATMENTS
Special Report: As virus advances, doctors rethink rush to ventilate
In China, 86% of 22 COVID-19 patients didn’t survive invasive ventilation at an intensive care unit in Wuhan, the city where the pandemic began, according to a study published in The Lancet in February. Normally, the paper said, patients with severe breathing problems have a 50% chance of survival.
A recent British study found two-thirds of COVID-19 patients put on mechanical ventilators ended up dying anyway, and a New York study found 88% of 320 mechanically ventilated COVID-19 patients had died.
More recently, none of the eight patients who went on ventilators at the Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi hospital had died as of April 9, a doctor there told Reuters. And one ICU doctor at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta said he had had a “good” week when almost half the COVID-19 patients were successfully taken off the ventilator, when he had expected more to die.
The experiences can vary dramatically. The average time a COVID-19 patient spent on a ventilator at Scripps Health’s five hospitals in California’s San Diego County was just over a week, compared with two weeks at the Hadassah Ein Kerem Medical Center in Jerusalem and three at the Universiti Malaya Medical Centre in the Malaysian capital Kuala Lumpur, medics at the hospitals said.