One-Year Mortality and Hospital Readmission in Survivors of COVID-19 Critical Illness—A Population-Based Cohort Study

Abstract

<p>OBJECTIVES: To evaluate 1-year outcomes (mortality, and recurrent hospital and ICU readmission) in adult survivors of COVID-19 critical illness compared with survivors of critical illness from non-COVID-19 pneumonia. DESIGN: Population-based retrospective observational cohort study. SETTING: Province of Ontario, Canada. PATIENTS: Six thousand ninety-eight consecutive adult patients (≥ 18 yr old) from 102 centers, admitted to ICU with COVID-19 (from January 1, 2020, to March 31, 2022), and surviving to hospital discharge. INTERVENTIONS: None. MEASUREMENTS AND MAIN RESULTS: The primary outcome was 1-year mortality. We also evaluated the number of emergency department (ED) visits, hospital readmissions, and ICU readmissions over this same time period. We compared patients using overlap propensity score-weighted, cause-specific proportional hazard models. Mean age was 59.6 years and 38.5% were female. Of these patients, 1610 (26.4%) and 375 (6.1%) were readmitted to hospital and ICU, respectively, and 917 (15.0%) died within 1 year. Compared with survivors of critical illness from non-COVID-19 pneumonia (n = 2568), those who survived COVID-19 critical illness had a lower risk of ED visit (hazard ratio [HR], 0.65 [95% CI, 0.60-0.71]), hospital readmission (HR, 0.56 [95% CI, 0.51-0.62]), ICU readmission (HR, 0.44 [95% CI, 0.37-0.53]), and mortality (HR, 0.67 [95% CI, 0.58-0.78]) within 1 year. CONCLUSIONS: Risk of ED visit, hospital readmission, ICU readmission, and mortality within 1 year of discharge among survivors of COVID-19 critical illness was lower than survivors of critical illness from non-COVID-19 pneumonia.</p>