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

Since started in the last month of 2019, the outbreak of the SARS-Cov-2 infection has successfully attracted attention of the whole world. By virtue of its highly contagious attribution, this novel coronavirus has spread across over 113 countries/territories and caused 118,319 infected cases with 4292 deaths, as of 11 th March 2020 and the numbers are still rapidly increasing. 1 Moreover, the threat of SARS-Cov-2 to global health is rapidly increasing, which made the World Health Organization declare COVID-19 a 'Pandemic'. Undoubtedly, preparedness for the virus strike is necessary and critically important, especially for those countries at high risk but with relatively weaker public health systems. Under this circumstance, the experience of containment from peer countries and territories and comprehensive research on COVID-19 would undoubtedly help. Many previous studies have generally reported the epidemiological features, clinical characteristics and virology of SARS-Cov-2. [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] But the features and characteristic of the disease may present differently among different locations and over time 9 , since the pathogen, SARS-Cov-2, may evolve after transmissions. 10 It thus is important to closely follow these changes for better containment and management of COVID-19. In addition, the durations of COVID-19 (e.g., the average time from exposure to recovery and hospitalization duration) which is important for understanding this disease and useful for the preparedness and response correctly to COVID-19, were not reported, mainly because most patients included in the previous studies still remained in hospital as the study being done. Here, we presented the clinical data of 77 hospitalized patients with COVID-2019 in YouAn Hospital (Beijing, China) with the aim of giving the information about clinical characteristics and different durations of COVID-19: incubation period, illness onset to first hospital, illness onset to discharge, exposure to discharge, and hospitalization duration. Additionally, this paper also aims to identify the potential risk factors for longer hospitalization duration of COVID-19.