Abstract
There are different patterns in the COVID-19 outbreak in the general population and amongst nursing home patients. We investigate the time from symptom onset to diagnosis and hospitalization or the length of stay (LoS) in the hospital, and whether there are differences in the population. Sciensano collected information on 14,618 hospitalized patients with COVID-19 admissions from 114 Belgian hospitals between 14 March and 12 June 2020. The distributions of different event times for different patient groups are estimated accounting for interval censoring and right truncation of the time intervals. The time between symptom onset and hospitalization or diagnosis are similar, with median length between symptom onset and hospitalization ranging between 3 and 10.4 days, depending on the age of the patient (longest delay in age group 20–60 years) and whether or not the patient lives in a nursing home (additional 2 days for patients from nursing home). The median LoS in hospital varies between 3 and 10.4 days, with the LoS increasing with age. The hospital LoS for patients that recover is shorter for patients living in a nursing home, but the time to death is longer for these patients. Over the course of the first wave, the LoS has decreased.
Highlights
The world is currently faced with an ongoing coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic.The disease is caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2, a new strain of the coronavirus, which was never detected before in humans, and is a highly contagious infectious disease
After correcting for age, it is observed that the time delay is somewhat higher when patients come from a nursing home facility, with an increase of approximately 2 days
Previous studies in other countries reported a mean time from symptom onset to hospitalization of 2.62 days in Singapore, 4.41 days in Hong Kong and 5.14 days in the UK [16]
Summary
The world is currently faced with an ongoing coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic.The disease is caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2, a new strain of the coronavirus, which was never detected before in humans, and is a highly contagious infectious disease. The world is currently faced with an ongoing coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. The first outbreak of COVID-19 occurred in Wuhan, province Hubei, China in December 2019. Several outbreaks have been observed throughout the world. There is currently little detailed knowledge on the time interval between symptom onset and hospital admission, nor on the length of stay (LoS) in hospital in Belgium. Information about the LoS in hospital is important to predict the number of required hospital beds, both for beds in general hospital and beds in the intensive care unit (ICU), and to track the burden on hospitals [1]. The time delay from illness onset to death is important for the estimation of the case fatality ratio [2]. Individual-specific characteristics, such as the gender, age and co-morbidity of the individual, could potentially explain differences in LoS in the hospital
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