COVID-19 death rates falling, studies find
Doctors better understand how to treat disease
While COVID-19 cases are rising in many parts of the world, including the United States and Canada, two new studies found a significant drop in death rates among hospitalized patients.
Researchers in both the U. S. and U. K. found that fewer people among various groups, including older patients and those with underlying health conditions, are dying from the disease, indicating that doctors are now better able to treat patients and also recognize early COVID-19 symptoms.
“We find that the death rate has gone down substantially,” Dr. Leora Horwitz, a professor of population health at NYU Grossman School of Medicine and one of the authors of the U. S. study, told NPR.
Horwitz and her team analyzed data from nearly 5,000 patients hospitalized for COVID- 19 at a single health system in New York City — an area heavily hit by the disease — from March to June. They found that mortality rates dropped 18 per cent in that period.
In the study, which will be published in the Journal of Hospital Medicine this week, researchers concluded that the reason behind the fact that fewer people are dying from the virus may be due to a combination of medical advancements and doctors understanding better how to prevent and treat serious symptoms of COVID-19.
Doctors have learned more about watching for the “cytokine storms” and blood clots that killed many patients earlier on, and public health interventions — including physical distancing and mask- wearing — may also be factors. Researchers wrote that both of these interventions “lower viral load exposure,” meaning they help reduce the spread.
The decline in mortality is good, but Horwitz told NPR that COVID-19’S death rate “is still higher than many infectious diseases, including the flu.” What’s more, you can still have complications or lingering effects.
“It still has the potential to be very harmful in terms of long- term consequences for many people,” Horwitz said.
The U. K. study yielded similar results. Researchers there looked at 21,000 hospitalized cases of COVID-19 in England and found that over time, the death rate decreased around 20 points since the height of the pandemic. One of the study’s authors, Bilal Mateen, a data science fellow at the Alan Turing Institute in the United Kingdom, told NPR the drops are also across age groups, racial groups and among people with underlying conditions.
Mateen and his team’s work will be published in the medical journal Critical Care Medicine, but a preprint is already online.
Alison Thompson, an associate professor at the University of Toronto’s Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy whose research focuses on public health policies, says these findings are not a “getout-of-jail-free card.”
“Just because those death rates are going down doesn’t mean that we aren’t going to see a lot of illness still,” Thompson said. “And as we head into influenza season … we don’t really know what that’s going to look like yet because we haven’t experienced a whole flu season where people could be getting both viruses at the same time.”
In Canada, COVID- 19 cases are spiking in the hot spots of Ontario, Quebec and Alberta.
While death rates dropped since the pandemic began, Canada’s top public health doctor, Dr. Theresa Tam, warned hospitalizations and deaths could increase with rising case counts.
As of Saturday, the number of active COVID-19 cases rose 16 per cent week over week, according to the Public Health Agency of Canada.
The sharp uptick left an average of 1,010 patients being treated in hospital each day over the past week, about 20 per cent of whom were in intensive care, Tam said. Average daily deaths associated with the virus reached 23 over the past seven days, up from six deaths six weeks ago.
“As hospitalizations and deaths tend to lag behind increased disease activity by one to several weeks, the concern is that we have yet to see the extent of severe impacts associated with the ongoing increase in COVID-19 disease activity,” Tam said.