(HealthDay News) — From March 2020 to November 2022, there was a decline in crude in-hospital mortality for severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2)-associated sepsis, according to a study published online Sept. 29 in JAMA Network Open.
Claire N. Shappell, MD, MPH, from Harvard Medical School/Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute in Boston, and colleagues conducted a retrospective cohort study of adults hospitalized at five Massachusetts hospitals between March 2020 and November 2022 to describe trends in the quarterly incidence and in-hospital mortality for SARS-CoV-2-associated and presumed bacterial sepsis.
Data were included for 431,017 hospital encounters from 261,595 individuals. Of these, 5.4% were from SARS-CoV-2, 1.5 percent had SARS-CoV-2-associated sepsis, and 7.1% had presumed bacterial sepsis without SARS-CoV-2 infection. The researchers found a decline in the crude in-hospital mortality for SARS-CoV-2-associated sepsis from 33.4 to 14.9% in the first and last quarter (adjusted odds ratio, 0.88 per quarter). For presumed bacterial sepsis, crude mortality was 14.5% and was stable across quarters. Electronic health record (EHR)-based SARS-CoV-2-associated sepsis criteria performed well relative to sepsis-3 criteria on medical record reviews of 200 SARS-CoV-2-positive hospitalizations (sensitivity, 90.6%; specificity, 91.2%).
“These findings highlight the high burden of SARS-CoV-2-associated sepsis and demonstrate the feasibility of using EHR-based algorithms to conduct surveillance for viral sepsis,” the authors write.
One author disclosed ties to UpToDate and Cytovale.
