‘Covid-19 vaccines reduced mortality’

Patients who received one or two doses of covid-19 vaccine were protected from hospital death during the pandemic, an ICMR study said.

The study was done on 29,509 hospitalized covid-19 patients from 42 hospitals enrolled in the National Clinical Registry for covid-19 (NCRC) between September 2020 and October 2021.

The study showed that in-hospital mortality was 14.5%—significantly higher in those individuals above 60 years of age with co-morbidities like diabetes, chronic kidney or liver disease, malignancy, and tuberculosis, etc, indicating the incidence of higher deaths at the time of admission.

“Analysis of 29,509 hospitalized, adult covid-19 patients showed that 15,678 (53.1%) had at least one comorbidity and 13,831 (46.9%) patients showed no co-morbidities. Around 25,715 (87.1%) patients were symptomatic with commonest symptom was fever (72.3%) followed by shortness of breath (48.9%) and dry cough (45.5%). In-hospital mortality was reported in 3,957 (14.5%),” stated the study published in the latest issue of Pubmed medical journal.

“Deaths were significantly higher in the age group of 60 years largely in males with pre-existing illnesses,” said Dr Samiran Panda, one of the authors of the study.

Hypertension and diabetes mellitus were the most common comorbidities reported among 32.4% and 26.2% of patients, respectively. Chronic cardiac disease and chronic kidney disease was present among 5.7% and 3.6% of the study participants, respectively. “In our study, patients above 40 years of age had 1.3 times higher chances of dying than the younger patients, which increased to 2.1 times with advanced age ≥ 60 year. Importantly, the current study underlined the protection provided by covid-19 vaccination against in-hospital mortality and it significantly reduced the odds of dying by 50% with one dose and by 60% with two doses in comparison to those who were not vaccinated at all,” said ICMR scientist.

Right now, covid is in the endemic stage in India and new variants will be continuing to occur. But does not that necessarily mean that every variant is a variant of concern, said Panda.