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Veterans who came down with COVID-19 who didn t require hospitalization still experienced a higher risk of death six months later, as well as increased use of certain medications, compared with veterans without the illness, researchers found.
In a cohort of more than 74,000 veterans, COVID-19 survivors who were not hospitalized and survived at least the first 30 days of illness had an increased risk of death versus those without COVID-19 (HR 1.59, 95% CI 1.46-1.73), with an excess death rate of 8.39 per 1,000 COVID-19 patients at six months, reported Ziyad Al-Aly, MD, of VA Saint Louis Health Care System in Missouri, and colleagues.
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Compared with patients with seasonal flu, hospitalized COVID-19 patients face an increased need for ventilation and intensive care, longer hospital stays, more complications, and nearly five times the risk of death, according to a US study published yesterday in
BMJ.
The study, led by researchers from the VA Saint Louis Health Care System, mined the US Department of Veterans Affairs medical records database to compare the outcomes of 3,641 COVID-19 patients hospitalized from Feb 1 to Jun 17 with those of 12,676 hospitalized with the flu from 2017 to 2019.
Quadruple risk of ventilator use
Compared with the flu, COVID-19 was tied to a higher risk of death (hazard ratio [HR], 4.97), the need for mechanical ventilation (HR, 4.01) and intensive care (HR, 2.41), and needing an extra 3 days of hospitalization.