Clinical characteristics and durations of hospitalized patients with COVID-19 in Beijing: a retrospective cohort study

Wen Zhao; Shikai Yu; Xiangyi Zha; Ning Wang; Qiumei Pang; Tongzeng Li; Aixin Li

Currently, few studies reported the average hospital length of stay of discharged patients COVID-19. In the present study, we reported the average hospital length of stay were 13 days (IQR: 10-16.5) for patients with COVID-19, which is three days longer than Wang et al.'s report 5 based on 38 discharged patients from Wuhan. However, in their study, the patients' incubation period is two days longer than that of our study. Nevertheless, length of hospital stay of COVID-19 is significantly shorter than that of SARS in 2003, which was almost one month 17 , further indicating the milder severity of COVID-19. We also revealed that the cumulative probability of COVID-19 patients discharged within two weeks were 59.7% for non-severe and 11.8% for severe patients, respectively, which means that nearly 60% of non-severe patients will be discharged within two weeks. Since length of hospital stay is related to duration of illness onset to hospital admission, duration of illness onset to discharge may be better to present the clinical course of COVID-19. If further taking incubation time into consideration, the whole duration of COVID-19, from exposure to recovery, is 23 days. To the best of our knowledge, this might be the first description of whole duration of COVID-19. But only a small number of patients from a single center were included (n=20), further studies based on large sample size from multiple centers are warranted to confirm this finding.