Covid-19-related ICU deaths have plunged due to better drugs: Study

This article is more than 12 months old

Feb 03, 2021 06:00 am

PARIS: 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, according to research published yesterday.

Whereas medical staff in the first wave 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 per cent by October.

An earlier analysis by the same authors found that ICU mortality had fallen from 60 per cent in late March 2020 to 42 per cent at the end of May.

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. - AFP