1 in 5 Hospitalized NYC COVID Patients Needed ICU

WEDNESDAY, May 20, 2020 (HealthDay News) — More than one-fifth of hospitalized COVID-19 patients in New York City have critical illness, and nearly 80% of critically ill patients need ventilators to help them breathe, according to a new study.

The findings have important implications for U.S. hospitals, specifically the need to prepare for large numbers of COVID-19 patients who require intensive care, the researchers said. The study was published May 19 in The Lancet journal.

Since January, the United States has had more than 1.5 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 and more than 90,000 deaths.

“Although the clinical spectrum of disease has been characterized in reports from China and Italy, until now, detailed understanding of how the virus is affecting critically ill patients in the U.S. has been limited to reports from a small number of cases,” said study co-author Dr. Natalie Yip, an assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University Medical Center in New York City.

“Our study aimed to identify risk factors associated with death in critically ill COVID-19 patients in a U.S. hospital setting,” Yip said in a journal news release.

For the study, the researchers examined data on 1,150 adults with laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 who were admitted to two New York-area hospitals between March 2 and April 1 and followed for at least 28 days.

Of those patients, 22% were critically ill and required treatment in an intensive care or high dependency unit. The most common symptoms reported were shortness of breath, fever, cough, muscle pain and diarrhea.

Seventy-nine percent of critically ill patients needed a ventilator to breathe. They averaged 18 days on a ventilator. The range was 9 to 28 days.

Thirty-one percent of critically ill patients developed severe kidney damage and required therapy to support kidney function, such as dialysis.

By April 28, 39% of the critically ill patients had died; 37% were still hospitalized, and 23% had survived and had been discharged.

Two-thirds of the critically ill patients were men. Critical illness was more common in older patients (median age: 62, meaning half were older, half younger). Around 1 in 5 critically ill patients were under age 50.