Characteristics of laboratory-confirmed positive cases in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic in a university hospital

ABSTRACT

Introduction: The new coronavirus named SARS-CoV-2, emerged in Wuhan, China in December 2019 and caused a pandemic. Unusual clinic of viral pneumonia caused by this virus was named COVID-19 and pandemic was declared on 11 March 2020 by World Health Organization. In this study, it was aimed to investigate the epidemiological and clinical characteristics of pediatric and adult patients who were admitted to Ege University Faculty of Medicine (EUFM) Hospital, Izmir, Turkey with COVID-19 findings between March 2020 and February 2021 and whose diagnosis was confirmed by the SARS-CoV-2 RT-PCR test. Materials and Methods: Age and gender characteristics of the patients were screened according to the services and months they admitted to the hospital, and the severity of infection was evaluated in three groups as mild, moderate and severe. In the severe patient group, the relationship between the common comorbid diseases observed in the community and survival status of patients were also evaluated. All statistical analysis performed by SPSS V.26,0. Results: One year from the start of the pandemic, 75851 people applied to the EUFM Hospital with the suspicion of COVID-19. The age median of the patients who applied was 39 (age-range;0-96) and 50.7% were male patients. SARS-CoV-2 were detected in a total of 7951 (10.5%, median age 39) patients, of them 4044 (10.5%) were male and 3907 (10.5%) were female (p= 0.796). All of the patients, 66577 (87.8%) were adults and 9274 (12.2%) were children. The rate of positivity for SARS-CoV2 in pediatric and adult groups were 7.7% (n= 716) and 10.9% (7235), respectively (p= 0.000). The percentage of patients who were classified as mild, moderate, and severe were 92.7%, 3.4%, and 3.9%, respectively. As a result of paired comparisons for all three level case groups, a statistically significant difference was found between mild cases and others (p= 0.000). However, there was no statistically significant difference between moderate and severe cases (p= 0.298). The mild-moderate-severe clinical level distributions were 3721 (50.4%), 142 (52.7%), 181 (58.7%) in male, 3653 (49.5%), 127 (47.2%), 127 (41.2%) in female, respectively (p= 0.014). All severe clinical level patients, 234 (76%) were intensive care patients. Smoking, obesity, hypertension (HT), diabetes mellitus (DM), coronary artery disease (CAD), congestive heart failure (CHF), chronic renal failure (CRF), chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD),malignancy, and chemotherapy p values were found 0.037, 0.001, 0.052, 0.025, 0.003, 0.004, 0.006, 0.558, 0.355, 0.056, respectively. Conclusion: As a result, in a one-year period, COVID-19 showed up a mild illness in both the pediatric and adult groups without the need for hospitalization. In the community, women and men were equally infected with COVID-19, but severe-clinical-level disease was more common in men and over 60 years of age. Mortality rates were found to be high, especially in patients treated in intensive care. Smoking, obesity, DM, CAD, CHF, CRF comorbidities and being ≥60 years old, associated with poor prognosis and death. Due to the Izmir earthquake at the end of October, COVID-19 peaked in Ízmir, in November 2020.