Survival analysis of hospital length of stay of novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pneumonia patients in Sichuan, China

zhuo wang; John S. Ji; Yang Liu; Runyou Liu; Yuxin Zha; Xiaoyu Chang; Lun Zhang; Yu Zhang; Jing Zeng; Ting Dong; Xinyin Xu; Lijun Zhou; Jun He; Yin Deng; Bo Zhong; Xianping Wu

On December 31, 2019, China reported for the first time to the WHO Country Office an unexplained pneumonia found in Wuhan. On January 30, 2020, the COVID-19 outbreak was announced as a public health emergency of international concern. On March 11, 2020, WHO characterized COVID-19 as pandemic. 13 14 Novel coronavirus pneumonia has become a major public health event because of its extremely rapid transmission speed, large-scale spread and the extreme utilization of medical resources by numerous patients. Therefore, according to the local demographics and the current status of medical resources, it is extremely important to prepare for risk prevention and control in advance. We modeled demographic characteristics, treatment behaviors, clinical characteristics and local medical resources of hospitalized confirmed patients in order to inform prospective risk assessment for on different areas. Based on the hospitalization data of confirmed patients in Sichuan Province, we found that patients at least 45 years, those with serious illness, those living in areas with fewer healthcare workers per 1,000 people, and those admitted to higher levels of hospitalization had longer lengths of hospitalization, while gender, time interval from onset to visit the hospital had no effect on the length of the hospital stay. That is to say, areas with more vulnerable older populations may require more medical resource allocations to cope with longer hospital stays. In contrast, whether patients see a doctor in time does not seem to affect hospitalization periods, as the results of single factor and multi-factor survival analysis showed that there was no significant difference in the length of stay between the two groups whose time interval from onset to diagnosis is within 5 days and more than 5 day.