Baseline characteristics and outcomes of patients with COVID-19 admitted to intensive care units in Vancouver, Canada: a case series

Abstract

evere acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) causes coronavirus disease 2019 , now characterized as a pandemic by the World Health Organization. 1 Infection rates and deaths worldwide increased exponentially. About 35 000 confirmed cases and more than 1600 deaths were reported in Canada as of Apr. 21, 2020. 2 In British Columbia, as of May 20, 2020, there were 2467 confirmed cases and 149 deaths. 3 However, the number of new cases has been decreasing since the beginning of April 2020. More than 85% of the cases of COVID-19 in BC have been located in the Metro Vancouver area. 3 Initial studies from China 4 and Italy 5 showed mortality ranging from 26% to 62% in critically ill patients with COVID-19. Studies from Seattle 6 and New York 7 reported overall mortality ranging from 23% to 50%. In these case series, between 13% and 71% of patients remained in the intensive care units (ICUs) at the time of publication, so actual mortality may be greater than reported.Canadian data describing critically ill patients with COVID-19 are lacking, and better characterization is crucial to direct critical care resource allocation and to understand the disease in our local context. The aim of our multicentre case series was to describe the demographic characteristics, management patterns and outcomes among critically ill patients with COVID-19 in Metro Vancouver. MethodsWe conducted a case series of all patients with COVID-19 admitted to an ICU in the Metro Vancouver area from Feb. 21 to Apr. 14, 2020, with outcomes followed until May 5, 2020. This area serves about 3 million residents of BC (population 4.9 million). The hospitals included were Vancouver General Hospital (46 ICU beds, quaternary hospital), Surrey Memorial Hospital (46 ICU beds, tertiary hospital), Lions Gate Hospital (11 ICU beds, community hospital),

Safety and Feasibility of Umbilical Cord Mesenchymal Stem Cells in Patients with COVID-19 Pneumonia: A Pilot Study

“…In another series of patients in Milan, Italy, the mortality was 23% and 31% had been discharged [10]. In Vancouver, Canada, the mortality in ICU patients was 15.4% [11]. In our study, the mortality was about 6.25% which was relatively lower.…”

Clinical characteristics and risk factors of patients with severe COVID-19 in Jiangsu province, China: a retrospective multicentre cohort study

“…7 COVID-19 initial symptoms are not speci c, presenting with fever, and cough, which can then resolve spontaneously or progress to shortness of breath, dyspnoea, and pneumonia, leading to severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), renal failure, coagulation dysfunction, multiple organ failure and death. [8][9][10][11][12][13][14] Asymptomatic patients or patients with mild or moderate symptoms were mainly found by testing of those who had contacted patients con rmed with COVID-19, or had been to or had contacted with visitors from Wuhan, or had no identi able exposure but had some COVID-19 related symptoms.…”

“…Age, comorbidities, c-reactive protein, albumin, cytokine, lactate dehydrogenase, D-dimer, albumin, platelet, lymphocyte, neutrophil, smoking, cough, expectoration, chest pain, dyspnea, CT manifestations, et al, have been reported to be associated with the severity of COVID-19 in some small studies in China, [15][16][17][18][19][20][21] and other countires. 13,22,23 Jiangsu, a province in China over 600 km from Hubei without common geographical borders and 80 million population, reported over 600 patients infected with COVID-19. We report here an analysis of all cases in Jiangsu province from the 10 th January 2020 to the 15 th March 2020 to describe the epidemiological and clinical characteristics of cases and to identify risk factors for severe/critically ill COVID-19 presentation.…”

Mediating Effect of Deteriorated Kidney Function in Comorbidity-related Excess Deaths in COVID-19: A Retrospective Cohort Study

“…Preexisting comorbidities are prevalent among COVID-19 patients, especially in critical cases. According to a most last case series in Canada, at least one comorbidity was present in 73.5% COVID-19 patients who was admitted to intensive care unit (ICU) (1). The in-hospital death rates of COVID-19 patients are reported to range from 0.4-49.0%, which is correlated with preexisting comorbidities (2)(3)(4).…”