We used a publicly available data of 44,672 patients reported by China’s centre for disease control to study the role of age, sex, co-morbidities and health-care related occupation on COVID-19 mortality. The data is in the form of absolute numbers and proportions. Using the percentages, retrospective synthetic data of 100 survivors and 100 deaths were generated using random number libraries so that proportions of ages, genders, co-morbidities, and occupations were constant as in the original data. Logistic regression of the four predictor factors of age, sex, co-morbidities and occupation revealed that only age and comorbidities significantly affected mortality. Sex and occupation when adjusted for other factors in the equation were not significant predictors of mortality. Age and presence of co-morbidities correlated negatively with survival with co-efficient of -1.23 and -2.33 respectively. Odds ratio (OR) for dying from COVID-19 for every 10-year increase in age was 3.4 compared to the previous band of 10 years. OR for dying of COVID-19 was 10.3 for the presence of any of the co-morbidities. Our findings could help in triaging the patients in the emergency room and emphasize the need to protect the elderly and those with comorbidities from getting exposed.

Retained gossypiboma is a rare and under-reported complication of surgery, which can present in a variety of ways. Thus, a very high index of suspicion is required by the clinician to clinch the diagnosis in a postoperative patient. A 45-year-old woman, who was otherwise asymptomatic, presented to the General Surgery outpatient department (OPD) with a contrast-enhanced CT suggestive of a retained intra-abdominal foreign body from previous surgery. An exploratory laparotomy was planned on elective basis. Intraoperatively, dense inter-bowel adhesions were found in the upper abdomen. After a meticulous adhesiolysis, an ileoileal fistula and an intraluminal surgical sponge were discovered. Resection and anastomosis of the involved ileal segment was done. An asymptomatic patient with a migrated intramural gossypiboma with an ileoileal fistula is an extremely rare occurrence. In these circumstances, it becomes almost impossible for the surgeon to clinch the diagnosis of a gossypiboma in an otherwise asymptomatic patient, without the aid of radiological investigations.

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COVID-19 has spread throughout the world infecting 8,018,963 people and claiming 436,138 lives to date [...]