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

Sichuan Province, as a large populous and frequently travelled to region close to Hubei, has some control measures worth sharing with other regions. 15 On January 21, 2020, the Sichuan provincial government began to take a series of steps towards epidemic prevention and control, including conducting epidemic prevention training for primary healthcare workers, formulating new plans to allocate resources, preparing medical resources that would be used for at least until May, requiring patients with mild illness or suspected patients to select hospitals as close as possible to avoid cross infection, etc. 16 After the completion of these steps, the "first level emergency response" of the whole province was launched on January 24, 2020, requiring prohibition of any form of group gathering activities and avoidance of public panic. 17 This series of preparations may also be one of the reasons why the confirmed patients' median length of stay (19 days) in hospital in Sichuan Province is longer than the national average, which is 10 days, so that patients can get longer treatment and care in the hospital. 1 In China, the majority of cases were classified as mild (81%). The overall mortality rate was estimated to be 2.3%. 18 19 Although the mortality rate of COVID-19 was lower than that of SARS (10%) and MERS (34%), the total number deaths of COVID-19 globally exceeded SARS and MERS. [20] [21] [22] We posit that insufficient medical resources or unreasonable allocation . CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license It is made available under a author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity.