Comorbidity Analysis for In-hospital COVID-19 Deaths

Lessons from an undisclosed NHS Trust

With a row brewing over whether CDC director Rochelle Walensky actually admitted that 75% of all COVID-19 deaths involve people with 4 co-morbidities I thought I’d brush the dust off my old electronic patient record (EPR) data dump and have a look what happened in a UK NHS Trust between Mar 2020 and Sep 2021 in terms of in-hospital death ICD10 coding.

During this period a total of 3,436 COVID-19 deaths were registered across the NHS Trust and the distribution of comorbidity in terms of total diagnoses made is attached. The data dump provided ICD10 coding for ten registry fields which is why this chart runs to a maximum of ten possible diagnoses. Mean and median age was 79.7 years and 82 years respectively.

Only 88/3,436 (2.6%) of COVID-19 deaths were categorised as COVID-19 only (i.e. no additional comorbidity) though we do need to bear in mind EPR coding isn’t what it should be! Jumping up to deaths involving COVID-19 and one other diagnosis we find 455/3,436 (13.2%), this bringing us…