Decreased hospital visits and increased mortality rate in the emergency department during the COVID-19 pandemic: Evidence from Albania
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Abstract
Objective
To investigate the hospital visits and mortality rate during the COVID-19 in emergency department of Vlora regional hospital in Albania and to compare with the three previous years (2017-2019).
Data sources
Secondary data of patients that visited emergency department of Vlora Regional hospital Albania (largest hospital in the south of the country), since January 1, 2017 till December 31, 2020.
Study Design
This is a retrospective study. We used the hard copy of the patients’ health register records.
Extraction methods
The data extraction was conducted during March 2021 till June 2021. Eligible were all patients admitted and recorded in the registry of the Emergency department. The causes of admission were categorized in 14 different disease categories. All registered patient admitted to the Vlora regional hospital were included in the study. Patients that all data were not recorded and patients that data were not possible to be read were excluded.
Principal Findings
Study population included 44.917 patients during 2017-2020. Mean age of patients was 51.5 years, while 53.6% were females. The highest number of patients was in 2017 (n=12.407) and the lowest in 2020 (n=9.266). Increase of patients presented with cardiovascular, psychiatric and renal/urinary tract were observed in 2020 in comparison to 2019. Patients decreased over time with an average annual percent decrease of −7% (p-value=0.22). Joinpoint analysis revealed that mortality rate increased over time with an average annual percent increase of 34.3% (95% confidence interval= −42.7% to 214.8%, p-value=0.27).
Conclusions
During the study years the number of patients visiting emergency department decreased while mortality rate increased. Educating and raising awareness of patient to seek medical assistance should be a key objective of health policy makers and health personnel. A specific focus should be put on the more vulnerable (elderly and unemployed) as their health status is in higher risk.
Article activity feed
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SciScore for 10.1101/2021.10.07.21264204: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
Ethics not detected. Sex as a biological variable After admission in the emergency unit, in the patient health record is registered name, surname, age, gender (male / female), social status (employed / unemployed / retired, student), diagnose and outcome (discharge, admitted to hospital, referred to another hospital and death). Randomization not detected. Blinding not detected. Power Analysis not detected. Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).
Results from LimitationRecognizer: An explicit section about the limitations of the techniques …SciScore for 10.1101/2021.10.07.21264204: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
Ethics not detected. Sex as a biological variable After admission in the emergency unit, in the patient health record is registered name, surname, age, gender (male / female), social status (employed / unemployed / retired, student), diagnose and outcome (discharge, admitted to hospital, referred to another hospital and death). Randomization not detected. Blinding not detected. Power Analysis not detected. Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).
Results from LimitationRecognizer: An explicit section about the limitations of the techniques employed in this study was not found. We encourage authors to address study limitations.Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.
Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.
Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.
Results from rtransparent:- Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- No protocol registration statement was detected.
Results from scite Reference Check: We found no unreliable references.
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