Clinical and Epidemiological Findings and Imaging Characteristics of COVID-19 Related Deaths in Baqiyatallah Hospital in Tehran

In December 2019, a kind of viral pneumonia associated with the 2019 novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) appeared in Wuhan, China and then a pandemic of COVID-19 created. We aimed to clarify the epidemiological, clinical findings and imaging characteristics of COVID-19 pneumonia.

In this cross-sectional study, after reviewing the records cases of the patients who died from covid-19 referred to the Baqiyatallah hospital, as a referral center in Tehran (20 Feb 2019 to 20 May 2020). In this time, 3220 patients met clinical manifestation of COVID-19 which 278 cases were included in our study. Demographic data and clinical and imaging findings of patients were recorded. The data were entered into SPSS Ver.26 software and analyzed subsequently.

278 patients who died from COVID-19 enrolled in the study. The average age was 66.01 (SD 13.7), including 207 (74.5%) men and 71 (25.5%) women. 193 (69.4%) patients at least had an underlying disease. The most common clinical presentations include fever in 194 (69.8%), cough in 148 (53.2%) and shortness of breath in 230 (82.7%) patients. Ground-glass opacity in 243 (87.4%) of the patients was the most apparent finding in their lung CT Scan. The Mortality rate of COVID-19 in this study was 8.63%. although, there was no relationship between the pattern of CT-scan and oxygen saturation in the mentioned patients (P >0.05).

This study showed that two-thirds of the death cases were the old men who had a least an underlying disease; this requires a specific consideration on their management and follow-up; wherefore, their more prolonged admission days have a financial load on the health system.