Clinical characteristics of 82 death cases with COVID-19

Bicheng Zhang; Xiaoyang Zhou; Yanru Qiu; Fan Feng; Jia Feng; Yifan Jia; Hengcheng Zhu; Ke Hu; Jiasheng Liu; Zaiming Liu; Shihong Wang; Yiping Gong; Chenliang Zhou; Ting Zhu; Yanxiang Cheng; Zhichao Liu; Hongping Deng; Fenghua Tao; Yijun Ren; Biheng Cheng; Ling Gao; Xiongfei Wu; Lilei Yu; Zhixin Huang; Zhangfan Mao; Qibin Song; Bo Zhu; Jun Wang

Our study firstly focused on the epidemiological characteristics of dead patients with COVID-19. Several factors were responsible for the death of these patients included in this study. A majority of patients were older than 60 years in our study, and a borderline significant association between age and time from initial symptom to death were interestingly observed. These results are consistent with that older age was more likely occurred in critically ill patients. 16 Moreover, we found underlying diseases such as hypertension, heart disease and diabetes were very common in our death cases, and 30.5% of patients had 2 or more comorbidities. These features are consistent with previous report that patients with underlying diseases more likely developed to severe illness. 9 Cancer patients is comprised of 7.3% in our cohort, much higher than cancer morbidity, suggest that cancer patients more likely develop to severe disease, even death. These results are consistent with the findings from a national wide analysis in China. 17 Immune deficiency to virus infection seems to be the common features in older males with comorbidities.