Covid in Brazil: One in five people hospitalized died with no access to ICU

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – In Brazil, 1 in every 5 hospitalized patients with coronavirus complications died with no access to an ICU bed since the start of the pandemic, between March 2020 and mid-February this year.

The calculation was done by the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz) and considers SUS (Unified Health System) hospitalization records and takes into account the deaths of patients whose ICU admission records are unclear in addition to those who are documented as having no bed.

However, access to intensive care is not a guarantee of surviving the disease, but it greatly increases the chances: 49% of patients admitted to an ICU survived.

The numbers were collected by researcher Diego Xavier, from the Institute of Communication and Scientific and Technological Information in Health of Fiocruz (Icict/Fiocruz), who points to a worsening of these numbers, given the collapse of health systems in most Brazilian states.

“With no beds available in several states, the catastrophe will be even greater. The whole network is collapsed, so these numbers of deaths outside the ICU will increase. The trend is that this will greatly increase,” he projects.

The survey takes into account 219,040 Covid-19 deaths that occurred in public hospitals in Brazil over almost a year. To determine that 1 in every 5 hospitalized patients dies without access to an ICU, Xavier added up the number of deaths of patients who did not in fact reach the ICU and those who were not registered as having reached an ICU or not, according to the Unified Health System data.

“It is very likely that these deaths also refer to patients who never got intensive care. A total of 72.200 people were hospitalized and did not get to an ICU bed, which is a third of Covid deaths,” said Diego Xavier.

The proportion of hospitalized patients’ deaths who did not get to an ICU bed varies according to each state and reflects the inequality in access to intensive care amid the pandemic. In 10 states, at least 25% of hospitalized patients died before reaching an ICU bed.

The situation is worse in the North region, which has a smaller hospital network. In Roraima, 53% of the hospitalized patients died without an ICU bed. Next are Acre (33%) and Amazonas (31%). Ceará, Espírito Santo, Maranhão, Pará, Pernambuco, Rio de Janeiro, and Sergipe registered the death of 1 in every 4 patients hospitalized due to Covid.

The numbers were collected from the Unified Health System’s open database. The healthcare system collapse also disrupts the updating of figures, given the high number of hospitalizations and deaths in the country in 2021.

Source: CNN