News Scan for Jan 26, 2022

COVID patients at high risk of readmission, death after hospital releaseA large UK study yesterday in PLOS Medicine finds that COVID-19 patients released from the hospital were more than twice as likely as the general population to be rehospitalized or die within the next 10 months.

They were also at nearly five times the risk for death from any cause.London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine researchers led the study, which used the electronic health records of 24,673 COVID-19 patients released from the hospital from February to December 2020 and surviving at least 1 week.The researchers compared the data with those from 123,362 demographically matched controls from the general population in 2019 and 16,058 patients released from the hospital after treatment of flu from 2017 to 2019.

All patients were followed up for at least 315 days. The median age of COVID-19 patients was 66 years, 56% were men, and 77% were White.The risk of hospitalization or death (30,968 events) was greater in COVID-19 patients than among controls (adjusted hazard ratio [aHR], 2.22) but somewhat lower than among flu patients (aHR, 0.95).

But the odds of death from any cause (7,439 events) was higher among the COVID-19 group than among controls (aHR, 4.82) and the flu group (aHR, 1.74).Risks for poor cause-specific outcomes were greater in COVID-19 survivors than in controls and about the same or lower than among flu patients, but the COVID-19 group was more likely than the flu group to be rehospitalized or die because of their initial infection or other lower respiratory tract infection (aHR, 1.37).