OBJECTIVES

The COVID-19 pandemic continues to affect humanity worldwide. Effects of COVID-19 infection on the respiratory system can be varied with more severe symptoms characterized by respiratory failure consequently necessitating hospitalization. Most people infected with SARS-CoV-2 typically recover with no serious comorbidities. Asia-Pacific countries have lower observed cumulative mortality rates 1.73% in USA, 3.00% in UK, and 1.48% in Japan at 2020 Dec. Given the pandemic status, health systems are coming under pressure due to increased demand, particularly by patients with respiratory failure as they require high acuity care. To describe the burden on the Japanese health system we estimated prevalence of the patient and incidence of respiratory failure among the patients using an electronic medical record (EMR) database from Japanese hospitals.

METHODS

IQVIA Health Information System database, consisting of EMR data from 14 hospitals with bed sizes >300 was analyzed. COVID-19 cases were identified by Japanese disease code (8833876, 8850104, and 20104132). We defined severe cases as records involving mechanical ventilation, admission to ICU/HCU, and intubation by Japanese claims code.

RESULTS

A total of 379,685 patients were in the database from February to September 2020, and from there 545 (0.143%) cases were confirmed as COVID-19 patients. 315 (57.7%) were male, age ranged from 1 to 90 years (median 47). Duration of hospitalization ranged from one day to 117 days (median 10 days).81(14.9%) patients had a record of mechanical ventilation, 88(16.1%) patients had a record of ICU/HCU admission, and 14(2.6%) patients had a record of intubation. 132(24.2%) patients had at least one of these procedures listed.

CONCLUSIONS

The prevalence of COVID-19 was 0.1% and rate of severity was 1.6% on Nov 2020 by Japanese government. This analysis suggests respiratory failure amongst COVID-19 patients to be greater than those stated in Japanese Government statistics.