PARIS, Feb 2, 2021 (BSS/AFP) – Covid-19 treatments and improved hospital
care have reduced death rates in intensive care by more than a third since
the early months of the pandemic, but this progress might be stalling,
according to research published Tuesday.
Whereas medical staff in the first wave of the epidemic had few insights to
help them tackle the new virus, they now have some effective drugs and
therapies for treating severely ill patients.
A large-scale meta-analysis of overall mortality of Covid-19 patients in
intensive care units (ICUs) around the world, published in the journal
Anaesthesia, found that it had fallen to 36 percent by October.
An earlier analysis by the same authors found that ICU mortality had fallen
from 60 percent in late March 2020 to 42 percent at the end of May.
“After our first meta-analysis last year showed a large drop in ICU
mortality from Covid-19 from March to May 2020, this updated analysis shows
that any fall in mortality rate between June and October 2020 appears to have
flattened or plateaued,” the authors said.
Researchers looked at data from 52 observational studies involving 43,128
patients.
The studies were from Europe, North America and China — areas included in
the earlier analysis — as well as reports from the Middle East, South Asia
and Australia.
– Pressure from new variants –
The authors said that hospitals now have much more knowledge about what
works — and what does not.
In particular, medics now can use steroids like dexamethasone to improve
the survival chances of seriously ill patients on oxygen support. Strategies
for oxygen therapy, fluid therapy and management of blood clotting have all
evolved since the early days of the pandemic.
But with several new variants of the coronavirus emerging in the months
since the end of their analysis, they said ICUs may come under further
pressure.
British scientists recently warned that the variant that emerged there was
not only more transmissible, but could also be more deadly.
Peter Horby, who leads the Recovery trial that provided the evidence for
the use of dexamethasone, said recently however that the drugs should
continue to work equally well with the new variants. This is because they act
on the body’s immune response, not the virus itself.
Horby, professor of emerging infectious disease at Oxford University, said
overall improvements in therapies and treatments have brought down case
fatality rates since the first wave and could even “offset any difference
with this new variant”.