Trends in non-COVID-19 hospitalizations prior to and during the COVID-19 pandemic period, United States, 2017 – 2021

Abstract

COVID-19 pandemic-related shifts in healthcare utilization, in combination with trends in non-COVID-19 disease transmission and NPI use, had clear impacts on infectious and chronic disease hospitalization rates. Using a national healthcare billing database (C19RDB), we estimated the monthly incidence rate ratio of hospitalizations between March 2020 and June 2021 according to 19 ICD-10 diagnostic chapters and 189 subchapters. The majority of hospitalization causes showed an immediate decline in incidence during March 2020. Hospitalizations for diagnoses such as reproductive neoplasms, hypertension, and diabetes returned to pre-pandemic norms in incidence during late 2020 and early 2021, while others, like those for infectious respiratory disease, never returned to pre-pandemic norms. These results are crucial for contextualizing future research, particularly time series analyses, utilizing surveillance and hospitalization data for non-COVID-19 disease. Our assessment of subchapter level primary hospitalization codes offers new insight into trends among less frequent causes of hospitalization during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Decline and uneven recovery from 7 common long-term conditions managed in the Catalan primary care after two pandemic years: an observational retrospective population-based study using primary care electronic health records”

“…The reduction of non-COVID diagnoses has been described in several countries, for both acute and chronic disease [7]. But unlike infectious diseases [14,15], the drop of chronic disease diagnoses does not usually imply a reduction of the real incidence, but rather a reduction of detected cases, suggesting the incidence of a large number of undetected conditions, untreated diseases and hence potentially increased long-term morbidity and mortality [2,3,6,7,16,17]. For instance, in a study performed in Catalonia central area in 2020, the reductions of new diagnoses accounted for 31%, with greater drops during the lockdown in Spain (March-June 2020) [9].…”

Decline and uneven recovery from 7 common long-term conditions managed in the Catalan primary care after two pandemic years: an observational retrospective population-based study using primary care electronic health records

“…The reduction of non-COVID diagnoses has been described in several countries, for both acute and chronic disease [7]. But unlike infectious diseases [14,15], the drop of chronic diseases diagnoses does not usually imply a reduction of the real incidence, but rather a reduction of detected cases, suggesting the incidence of a large number of undetected conditions, untreated diseases and hence potentially increased long-term morbidity and mortality [2, 3 6, 7, 16, 17]. For instance, in a study performed in Catalonia central area in 2020, the reductions of new diagnoses accounted for 31%, with greater drops during the lockdown in Spain (March -June 2020) [9].…”