Correlation between hospitalized patients’ demographics, symptoms, comorbidities, and COVID-19 pandemic in Bahia, Brazil

In this paper, we provide a retrospective cohort study with patients that have been hospitalized for general or intensive care unit admission due to COVID-19, between March 3 and July 29, 2020, in the state of Bahia, Brazil. We aim to correlate those patients’ demographics, symptoms and comorbidities, with the risk of mortality from COVID-19, length of hospital stay, and time from diagnosis to definitive outcome. On the basis of a dataset provided by the Health Secretary of the State of Bahia, we selected 3,896 hospitalized patients from a total of 154,868 COVID-19 patients that included non-hospitalized patients and patients with invalid registration in the dataset. Then, we statistically analyzed whether there was a significant correlation between the patient record data and the COVID-19 pandemic, and our main findings reinforced by the use of a multivariable logistic regression were that older age (Odds Ratio [OR] = 1.03, 95% Confidence Interval [CI] = 1.03-1.04, p-value ( p ) <0.001), an initial symptom of shortness of breath (OR = 1.88, 95% CI = 1.60-2.20, p < 0.001), and the presence of comorbidities, mainly chronic kidney disease (OR = 2.41, 95% CI = 1.67-3.48, p < 0.001) are related to an increased risk of mortality from COVID-19. On the other hand, sore throat (OR = 0.74, 95% CI = 0.58-0.95, p = 0.02) and length of hospital stay (OR = 0.96, 95% CI = 0.58-0.95, p < 0.001) are more related to a reduced risk of mortality from COVID-19. Moreover, a multivariable linear regression conducted with statistically significant variables ( p < 0.05) showed that age (OR = 0.97, 95% CI = 0.95-0.98, p < 0.001) and time from diagnosis to definitive outcome (OR = 1.67, 95% CI = 1.64-1.71, p < 0.001) are associated with the length of hospital stay.