Hospital length of Stay among COVID-19 Patients: An Application of Competing Risk Analysis

In the present study, the goal was to estimate the hospital length of stay among patients admitted with COVID-19 in a hospital in Tehran.

We used retrospective data on 446 hospitalized patients with COVID-19 who admitted from 7 March to 8 Oct 2020 in a referral hospital in Tehran, Iran. The prognostic effects of variables, including age, gender, comorbidity status, and symptoms were analyzed by using Kaplan-Meier methods and a competing risk analysis. Length of stay in hospital was calculated using time of last status minus time of admission. All analyses performed using SPSS version 22.0 and STATA version 15.

The mean age of cases was 57.09±16.85 years old. The median (IQR) of hospital length of stay among all patients was 7 (11-5) days. The length of Hospital stay, for >80 years’ patients (9days (15-5)) and females (7days (11-5)) was the longest. The most of cases (94 (21.1%)) were in 60–69 age group. In overall 267 (59.9%) of all cases were males and 179 (40.1%) were females. The most common symptom among patients was Respiratory distress 249 (55.8), Cough 233 (52.2) and fever 209 (46.9) respectively. Regarding having any comorbidities, 106 (23.8%) of COVID-19 cases had Cardiovascular disease, 114 (25.6%) had diabetes and 100 (22.4%) had hypertension. Most of deaths (21 (32.3%)) occurred in 70-79 years’ age group. The overall Case Fatality Rate (CFR) in under-studied cases was 14.6%.

Although the result of the present study showed that hospital length of stay in Iran is not higher than in other countries, but by applying some measures including the early detection of suspected cases and timely treatment and necessary funding on preparing required facilities, medicine and equipment, it could be shortened or at least prevented from increasing.