Some good news.
Death rates for people hospitalised from COVID appear to be falling with two large recent studies showing that people hospitalised for the virus in March were more than three times as likely to die as people hospitalised after contracting COVID in August.
The first study – which looked at data from three hospitals in New York City – showed the chance of death for an individual hospitalised for COVID dropped from an adjusted 25.6% (430 out of 1,724 people) in March to 7.6% in August (five out of 134 people).
A second study – which examined survival rates in England – also found a similar improvement.
To avoid the results being skewed by a higher number of older people – who are more likely to die from the virus – being hospitalised, the researchers accounted for a range of factors in their final figures including age, race and ethnicity, oxygen support and other risk factors such as being overweight, smoking, high blood pressure and diabetes.
Even with these risks, the death rates improved between March and August.
The researchers attribute this decline to a better recognition of when COVID patients are at higher risk of death and the wider availability of standardised treatments as well as efforts to keep hospitals below their maximum capacity and mandating masks and social distancing.
They also caution that the death rate is still higher than many infectious diseases, including the flu.
“It still has the potential to be very harmful in terms of long-term consequences for many people,” Leora Horwitz, a doctor who studies population health at New York University's Grossman School of Medicine and an author on one of the studies, said. “A lot of my patients are still complaining of shortness of breath. Some of them have persistent changes on their CT scans and impacts on their lung functions.”
