Researchers at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) examined the Covid-19 impact on hospitalised patients with infection v/s patients hospitalised with influenza between March and April 2020.

The findings of the study indicated that coronavirus cases resulted in significantly more weekly hospitalisations, more use of mechanical ventilation, and higher mortality rates than influenza.

The study, published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, stated that both the infections can lead to pneumonia and acute respiratory failure in severe cases.

However, a detailed comparison of the epidemiology and clinical characteristics of Covid-19 and those of influenza are lacking.

“Covid-19 has been compared to influenza both by health care professionals and the lay public, but there’s really limited detailed objective data available for comparing and contrasting the impact of these two diseases on patients and hospitals,” said corresponding author Michael Donnino, MD, Critical Care and Emergency Medicine physician at BIDMC.

He added: “We compared patients admitted to BIDMC with Covid-19 in spring 2020 to patients admitted to BIDMC with influenza during the last five flu seasons. We found that Covid-19 causes more severe disease and is more lethal than influenza.”

For the study, the researchers included a total of 1,634 hospitalised patients, 582 of whom had laboratory-confirmed Covid-19 and 1,052 of whom had confirmed influenza.

The team found that, on average, 210 patients were during each eight-month flu season, compared to the 582 patients with Covid-19 admitted in March and April 2020.

While 30 per cent of Covid-19 patients received mechanical ventilation during the two-month period, just eight per cent of people with influenza were placed on ventilation.

Furthermore, the proportion of patients who died was much higher for Covid-19 than for influenza. 20 per cent of admitted patients with Covid-19 died in the two-month period, compared to three per cent of patients with influenza over five seasons.

Further analysis revealed that hospitalised patients with Covid-19 tended to be younger than those hospitalised with influenza.

“Our data illustrate that 98 percent of deaths of patients hospitalized with Covid-19 were directly or indirectly related to their Covid-19 illness, illustrating that patients did not die with Covid but rather from Covid pneumonia or a complication,” said Donnino.

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