Epidemiological and Clinical Characteristics of 6635 COVID-19 Patients: a Pooled Analysis

Abstract

An unidentified pneumonia outbreak was first observed in Wuhan, the capital of Hubei Province, China, in December 2019. WHO officially named the disease, Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19), and declared it as pandemic on Mar 11, 2020. Globally, there are more than 3 million confirmed cases with nearly 200,000 deaths. Hence, we aimed to perform a systematic review and pooled analysis of the current published literature on COVID-19 to provide an insight on the epidemiological and clinical characteristics of COVID-19 patients. A systematic search of published peer-reviewed articles that reported cases with demographical and clinical features of real-time reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction (rRT-PCR)-confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection using MOOSE guidelines was conducted from December 1, 2019, to April 27, 2020, and 50 eligible articles were included for the final analysis. Review articles, opinion articles, and letters not presenting original data as well as studies with incomplete information were excluded. We included a total of 6635 patients from 50 articles, with 54.5 % being male. The predominant symptoms were fever (80.3%), cough (64.2%), and fatigue/myalgia (36.5%) and other symptoms including dyspnea, chest pain, and sore throat. We also found patients with GI symptoms like diarrhea (9.2%) and nausea/vomiting (5.2%). Comorbidities were found in 3,435 (51.7%) patients with the most common being hypertension (22.67%) followed by diabetes mellitus (12.78%). COVID-19 pandemic is not only leading a huge burden on health care facilities but significant disruption in the world society. Patients with coexisting comorbidities are at higher risk and need more utilization of health care resources. As this virus is spreading globally, all countries have to join hands and prepare at all levels of human resources, infrastructure, and facilities to combat the COVID-19 disease.Keywords COVID-19 . coronavirus disease . SARS-CoV-2 . 2019-nCoV . pandemic . outbreak . epidemiology This article is part of the Topical Collection on Covid-19

Is There a Link Between the Pathogenic Human Coronavirus Envelope Protein and Immunopathology? A Review of the Literature

“…Like SARS and MERS, these cytokines typically include IL-1, IL-2, IL-4, IL-7, IL-10, IL-12, IL-13, IL-17, granulocyte colonystimulating factor (GCSF), macrophage colony-stimulating factor (MCSF), IP-10, monocyte chemoattractant protein-1 (MCP-1), macrophage inflammatory protein 1-α (MIP-1α), hepatocyte growth factor (HGF), IFN-γ, and TNF-α and, when released collectively in hyperinflammatory conditions, are referred to as a cytokine storm (Chen C. et al, 2020;Huang et al, 2020;Liu et al, 2020;Zhou et al, 2020). Already, several reports have remarked on the clinical similarity between COVID-19, MERS and SARS with respect to its clinical presentation (Chan et al, 2020;Chen T. et al, 2020;Chhikara et al, 2020;Giwa et al, 2020;Huang et al, 2020;Lin et al, 2020;Prompetchara et al, 2020;Rasmussen et al, 2020;Wang D. et al, 2020;Wang Y. et al, 2020;Xie and Chen, 2020;.…”

Biomarkers and outcomes of COVID-19 hospitalisations: systematic review and meta-analysis

“…COVID-19 infection has a variable clinical presentation from asymptomatic to milder symptoms, including fever, dry cough, dyspnoea, myalgia, sore throat and headache, to more severe and emergent manifestation including confusion, chest pain, hypoxemia, pneumonia and other complications requiring intensive care unit (ICU) admission and mechanical ventilation. [5][6][7] Diarrhoea, anosmia and ageusia have also been reported in a few studies, [8][9][10] as well as neurologic manifestations. [11][12][13] Researchers all over the globe have been searching for predictors of COVID-19 disease severity to identify and stratify them accordingly, in an effort to guide medical management.…”

Factors Affecting Mortality in 1022 COVID-19 Patients Referred to an Emergency Department in Bergamo during the Peak of the Pandemic

“…The epidemiological and clinical characteristics of COVID 19 patients, with the pronominal symptoms and the main comorbidities, were described in the recent paper by Kaur et al [8].…”

“…We analyzed the data registered at patient presentation: age and sex, physiological and laboratory parameters, symptoms, and presence of comorbidities (cardiovascular diseases, respiratory diseases, arterial hypertension, diabetes, oncological diseases, chronic renal failure, neurological diseases, smoking, and others). We calculated also the Chronic Health Evaluation II (Apache II) [8] score and the Glasgow Coma Score (GCS), as indicators of risk of death, considering the measures obtained within 24 h from the patients' admission. The informed consent for the scientific utilization and publications of data related to the disease was obtained by the patients at their admission according to the Rules of Humanitas Gavazzeni COVID-19 Emergency Department.…”