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A new study involving Alberta researchers is adding another piece of the puzzle on how COVID-19 patients fare after being hospitalized.
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University of Alberta general internal medicine professor Dr. Finlay McAlister is the lead author of a study, published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, that examined the records of adult patients hospitalized for COVID in Ontario and Alberta from the start of 2020 to September 2021. Of more than 800,000 people who tested positive on a PCR test in both provinces, 5.5 per cent needed hospital care.
Of the people who were admitted to hospital with COVID, 18 per cent died there. But for those who were discharged after recovering, one in nine were readmitted or died within 30 days. Patients who died were generally older, had multiple health conditions and were more likely to be male.
McAlister, who has cared for many COVID patients on the general medicine wards during the pandemic, said the data helps fill gaps about what happens to people after they survive the disease.
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“There’s been a lot of attention, obviously, paid to admissions for COVID … and not a lot of attention paid to the post-discharge period.”
He said this study shows that rates of readmission to hospital after surviving COVID are roughly in line with readmission rates after a hospital stay for influenza or other respiratory infections.
That’s valuable information for hospital discharge planning, but McAlister added that it’s also important to note the way patient risk for COVID looks different than influenza: 14 per cent of hospitalized COVID patients needed ICU care, and 18 per cent died — much higher rates than influenza in past years. COVID patients also have longer hospital stays, on average, than people with influenza.
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“A lot of the COVID risk seems to be upfront, during the initial hospitalization,” McAlister said.
“COVID patients who were hospitalized have a lot more complications than we see with influenza patients: they get more blood clots, they have more heart problems, they have more kidney disease — just reflecting that (COVID-19) is more of a systemic illness. It’s not just a respiratory problem.”
He said another important takeaway is the role of vaccines. They weren’t available during the first wave of COVID, but Alberta’s immunization rollout began in mid-December 2020, during Alberta’s second wave.
“The key thing is just the startling numbers — 95 per cent of people in hospital (in Ontario) were unvaccinated in the second, third, fourth waves,” McAlister said. In Alberta, 91 per cent of people hospitalized were unvaccinated.
Symptoms have to be fairly serious to warrant admission to hospital, meaning this study doesn’t pick up many patients who experience a variety of “long COVID” symptoms after their initial illness — more research on that is underway.
McAlister said there’s also more work to do on outcomes for non-COVID patients if they needed hospital care during a COVID surge.
Twitter: @meksmith
New COVID study sheds light on hospital readmission risk after initial stay - Edmonton Journal
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