Association Between Ethnicity and Mortality Outcomes in Patients with COVID-19: A Mayo Clinic VIRUS Registry Cohort Study

J Racial Ethn Health Disparities. 2024 Mar 28. doi: 10.1007/s40615-024-01975-5. Online ahead of print.

Abstract

Hispanic populations face significant disparities in health and healthcare. The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted and sometimes further exacerbated these disparities. We conducted a multisite, retrospective cohort study of 6494 hospitalized adult patients admitted between March 2020 and January 2022 with a diagnosis of COVID-19 from five sites including academic hospitals in MN, AZ, and FL and community hospitals in MN and WI. This is an ancillary project of the Viral Infection and Respiratory illness Universal Study (VIRUS) registry, supplemented by electronic health record data. We compared in-hospital mortality and length of stay outcomes between Hispanic and non-Hispanic populations admitted with COVID-19 using propensity matched scores to account for imbalances in demographic and clinical covariables. Among a total of 6494 patients, 512 (7.9%) patients were reported deceased and 5982 (92.1%) alive at discharge. We did not find a statistically significant difference between in-hospital mortality nor length of stay between the two groups.

Keywords: COVID-19; Disparities; Ethnicity; Hispanic; ICU; VIRUS.