Demographic study of patients' mortality rate before and after the COVID-19 outbreak: A cross-sectional study

To better guide the health policies, it is essential to clarify the socio-demographic and clinical risk factors affecting the mortality rate of patients with coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19).

The purpose of this project is to separate hospital mortality statistics into different groups, which will definitely help in planning to reduce the mortality rate. As well, we aimed to compare factors involved in COVID-19 death between the period before and after its outbreak.

This cross-sectional study was performed based on all death certificates of archived records in Rasool Akram Hospital during the years 2018 and the first half of 2019. A checklist was completed based on the variables, including death cases by time, gender, age, duration of hospitalization, department of place and time of death, cause of death, cases referred to forensic medicine, information of the patient, including educational and occupational level and birth certificate issuing city, neonatal death, and IUFD, classification of diseases according to the provided version of ICD 10 (international classification of diseases 10th edition).

A number of 2632 deceased patients were included in this study, 1511 (57.4%) patients who died before the start of the COVID-19 outbreak, and 1121 (42.6%) patients died in the hospital after the start of this pandemic. There were statistically significant differences in gender (higher prevalence of males), increased average age, lower occupational status, decreased number of infants, increased cause of death due to COVID-19 and increased hospitalization in Royal ICU in dead patients (p < 0.05).

The findings show that the elderly cases are more at risk of COVID-19 mortality than other age groups, which needs more attention to this group of society and clarifies other epidemiological factors, as well as clinicopathological and public healthcare practices.