Crowded hospitals increase COVID patients’ risk of dying, study says
Coronavirus patients are being admitted to hospitals faster than ever, with more than 120,000 hospitalizations on Christmas Eve alone — the most on any day since the pandemic began.
More COVID-19 hospitalizations means more deaths, which also translates to high county-level case rates. Now, a new study has numbers to add evidence to the connection.
Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania found that adults hospitalized with COVID-19 have about a 1 in 10 chance of dying, according to their study published Dec. 22 in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine.
That’s “nearly four times higher than your likelihood of dying if you’re hospitalized with influenza, which is closer to 3%,” study co-authors and physicians at the University of Pennsylvania Dr. David Asch and Dr. Rachel Werner wrote in an opinion piece for USA Today.
And it’s because hospitals are reaching capacity, the researchers said. Shortages in staff, supplies and hospital beds are affecting how well health care workers can care for patients.
“What you may not realize is that if you contract COVID-19 and need hospitalization, your likelihood of surviving is getting worse by the day. It depends on how full the hospitals are. And today many hospitals are strained to a breaking point,” the researchers wrote.
“Our hospitals are full of heroic workers, but we all need to do our part to keep communities safe and case rates down. That way, if you do unfortunately get COVID-19 and need to be hospitalized, you have a better chance of surviving.”
The team studied 38,517 coronavirus patients admitted to 955 U.S. hospitals across 43 states and Washington, D.C., between Jan. 1 and June 30. Patients were Medicare Advantage and commercial enrollees 18 years old or older with a median age of 70.
Nearly 12% of adults in a hospital with COVID-19 died within 30 days, the study found, a risk that shrunk later in the pandemic.
People hospitalized with COVID-19 between January and April had a 17% chance of dying, while those admitted between May and June faced a 9% risk of dying.
Overall, 94% of hospitals in the study saw a reduction in COVID-19 deaths of more than 25% in “just a few months,” according to the paper. “That rate of relative improvement is striking and encouraging, but perhaps not surprising,” the team said.
That’s because health care workers have learned how to better take care of patients with the help of new treatments and drugs.
Some medications such as remdesivir and dexamethasone have helped COVID-19 patients improve, and other changes in patient management such as timing of ventilation, differences in oxygen flow, positioning on the bed, treatments for blood clots and greater use of masks have also proved beneficial in reducing coronavirus-related deaths.
The researchers also found that men had about a 1.3 times higher risk of dying than women, patients older than 85 had a 14.5 times higher risk of dying than those between 18 and 45 years old, and people transferred from nursing homes had a 2.4 times higher risk of death than those admitted from the community, the study said.
Generally, medium to large hospitals, hospitals in the Northeast and hospitals with high county-level coronavirus spread saw worse mortality rates. On the other hand, hospitals in regions where COVID-19 case rates dropped saw the “largest improvements in survival,” the doctors wrote in the USA Today opinion piece.
There are more than 19.1 million coronavirus cases in the U.S., according to Johns Hopkins, and more than 333,000 deaths.
As cases and hospitalizations continue to soar after the holidays, any given person with COVID-19 faces an increased likelihood of dying, erasing some of the gains made in treating patients.
But with nearly 2 million people vaccinated in the U.S. and more on the horizon, experts predict hospital systems will soon feel the first waves of relief.
This story was originally published December 28, 2020 at 10:44 AM with the headline "Crowded hospitals increase COVID patients’ risk of dying, study says."
