Death rate of critical Covid patients in England halves since start of pandemic

Improved treatment and less busy hospitals could be helping the decline, study finds

Medical staff wear personal protective equipment as a precautionary measure against Covid-19. AFP

Death rates have been dropping by half for people in hospital with severe Covid-19 symptoms, research published on Wednesday found.

The study analysed more than 21,000 hospital admissions and found significant drops in death rates, both in intensive care wards and high dependency units.

Possible reasons for the death rate reduction include medics knowing more about the disease and hospitals being less crowded.

In March, at about the time UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson was admitted to hospital, 41 per cent of patients in intensive care died, and 26 per cent of patients in high dependency units died.

In June, the figures were 21 per cent and 7 per cent, respectively.

The analysis, published in Critical Care Medicine, was carried out by the University of Exeter and the University of Warwick, and supported by the Alan Turing Institute.

“Importantly, we controlled for factors including age, sex, ethnicity and other health conditions such as diabetes. This suggests the improvement in death rates in more recent months is not simply due to younger, or previously healthier, people being admitted to critical care,” said Dr John Dennis, of the University of Exeter Medical School.

“A number of factors are likely to be at play here, including improved understanding of how to manage Covid-19 among doctors, and the introduction of effective treatments.”

The team looked at data collected by Public Health England and assessed the number of people dying within 30 days of being admitted to hospital.

“It’s possible that the higher death rates at the peak of the pandemic are in part because hospitals were so overcrowded at that point,” said Dr Bilal Mateen, from the University of Warwick.

"Even at the lowest point, nearly a quarter of admissions to intensive care were still dying – that's a huge number of people and we have to do all we can to control the spread of the virus and keep hospital admissions as low as possible.

“The reduction in the number of people dying from Covid-19 in hospitals is clearly a step in the right direction, but it’s important that we do not become complacent as a result."