Mortality in post-discharge COVID-19 patients from a tertiary care center - A follow-up study

ABSTRACT

COVID War Room;Cardiovascular Disease;Sudden Death;Post-Discharge;Case Fatality Rate INTRODUCTION The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), as first reported in Wuhan, China, in late December 2019,[1] had rapidly spread globally within a short period, and has now become a pandemic affecting more than 200 countries and territories. [...]Hon. Municipal Commissioner of Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai guided setting up a novel concept of "COVID War Room" and "medical call center" within it to establish communication and alleviate apprehensions of the patients and relatives during the unprecedented surge of SARS-CoV-2 infections. Furthermore, due to the lockdown and the ongoing medical emergency, follow-up of the discharged patients of SARSCoV-2 infections was not satisfactory. Because of this, Hon. Additional Municipal Commissioner of Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai, Director (Medical Education and Major Hospitals), and Dean planned to use the war room setup of our tertiary care center for telephonic follow-up in the patients who were treated successfully for COVID and discharged. Relatives who did not give consent and refused to provide any information, patients who took discharge against medical advice to either get quarantined at home and died at home or got admitted to another hospital and died in that hospital (suggestive of death directly due to COVID) and relatives or patients who could not be contacted because of wrong, invalid, or non-existing contact numbers were excluded from the data evaluation.