I recently co-authored a paper exploring 28-day mortality for patients hospitalized for COVID-19 in England over the first 5 months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Read the opening paragraphs here, and the full article on the Journal of Hospital Medicine website.
The early phase of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic in the United Kingdom (UK) was characterized by uncertainty as clinicians grappled to understand and manage an unfamiliar disease that affected very high numbers of patients amid radically evolving working environments, with little evidence to support their efforts. Early reports indicated high mortality in patients hospitalized with COVID-19.
As the disease became better understood, treatment evolved and the mortality appears to have decreased. For example, two recent papers, a national study of critical care patients in the UK and a single-site study from New York, have demonstrated a significant reduction in adjusted mortality between the pre- and post-peak periods.1,2 However, the UK study was restricted to patients receiving critical care, potentially introducing bias due to varying critical care admission thresholds over time, while the single-site US study may not be generalizable. Moreover, both studies measured only in-hospital mortality. It remains uncertain therefore whether overall mortality has decreased on a broad scale after accounting for changes in patient characteristics.
The aim of this study was to use a national dataset to assess the casemix-adjusted overall mortality trend in England over the first 5 months of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Continue Reading on the Journal of Hospital Medicine website.
1. Horwitz LI, Jones SA, Cerfolio RJ, et al. Trends in COVID-19 risk-adjusted mortality rates. J Hosp Med. 2020;16(2):90-92. https://doi.org/10.12788/jhm.3552
2. Dennis JM, McGovern AP, Vollmer SJ, Mateen BA. Improving survival of critical care patients with coronavirus disease 2019 in England: a national cohort study, March to June 2020. Crit Care Med. 2021;49(2):209-214. https://doi.org/10.1097/CCM.0000000000004747
