Fears about coronavirus are keeping heart attack victims out of the ER. It’s killing them.
Doctors may have been right to be concerned that people with heart problems were avoiding the ER due to Covid-19, according to a new study published Friday. She broke a hip, underwent surgeries, caught Covid-19. This 80-year-old woman laughed it all off It provides evidence that people have stayed away from the emergency room even with acute heart attack symptoms. And some may have died as a result. Researchers from the Providence Heart Institute system based in the US northwest looked at the records of more than 15,000 heart attack patients from between December 30 and May 16 of this year. They found “important changes” in heart attack hospitalization rates. Patients also fared worse during the early and later parts of the pandemic, they reported Friday in the medical journal JAMA Cardiology. And patients with the most serious type of heart attack appeared to be more than twice as likely to die at one point. Read More There was a substantial decrease in hospitalizations early in the pandemic, with the case rates starting to fall on February 23. Patients hospitalized for a heart attack during the pandemic tended to be younger by about 1 to 3 years than patients before the pandemic. The authors think older patients may have had a “greater reluctance” to get medical help if they had symptoms. Typically, older people have gotten sicker from Covid-19. See someone collapse near you? It’s still safe to perform CPR during the pandemic, study says Patients who were hospitalized for a heart attack during the pandemic spent less time at the hospital than before the pandemic. This may be because hospitals wanted to keep beds open in case they were needed for Covid-19 patients, the researchers said. The patients were all seen at hospitals within the Providence St. Joseph Health System in Alaska, California, Montana, Oregon, Texas and Washington. Patients were also more likely to be sent home from the hospital rather than sent to a rehabilitation center.
