Study finds Nearly All Patients Hospitalized With Covid-19 Had Chronic Health Issues
A new Journal of American Medical Assoication study of thousands of hospitalized coronavirus patients in the New York City area has found that nearly all of them had at least one major chronic health condition, and most — 88 percent — had at least two.
Though earlier research has shown chronic conditions like obesity, high blood pressure and diabetes are common risk factors for severe Covid-19, the ubiquity of serious medical conditions in these patients was striking: Only 6 percent of them had no underlying health conditions.
The researchers reported that when patients first came to the hospital and were triaged, 17 percent had an abnormal respiratory rate of more than 24 breaths per minute, and 28 percent received supplemental oxygen.
But fewer than one third of the patients had a fever, even though they were sick enough to be hospitalized, a similar observation to one noted by a large Chinese study.
This indicates that taking people’s temperatures in order to screen them for the coronavirus is likely to miss many people who are not only asymptomatic but also acutely ill.
Nearly 60 percent of those hospitalized at the Northwell facilities had high blood pressure, 40 percent were obese, and about one-third had diabetes. Smaller numbers of patients suffered from other chronic illnesses, such as heart disease, kidney disease and chronic respiratory illnesses.
The study included 5,700 patients hospitalized with COVID-19 in the New York City area, the most common comorbidities [simultaneous presence of two chronic diseases or conditions in a patient] were hypertension, obesity, and diabetes. Among patients who were discharged or died (sample size (n) = 2,634 patients), 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.
References:
- https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/23/health/coronavirus-patients-risk.html?referringSource=articleShare
- https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2765184