Comparative analysis of emergency department admissions: A multi-center study on patient characteristics and mortality before and during the early phase of pandemic in Turkey

The effect of the global healthcare events makes its initial impact to the emergency departments. As the vanguards of healthcare system emergency departments had handled the surge while undergoing physical changes to manage ongoing crisis. Therefore, for the preparation of further global events, admission rates and emergency department utilization of the pandemic requires further investigation. The aim of this study was to analyze the admissions in a multi-center scale and compare ICD codes and crude mortality rates during the early COVID-19 pandemic period and compare this data to the previous year of the outbreak. This was a multi-center study of 10 hospitals; including 2 tertiary and 8 secondary healthcare institutions. This study comparatively analyzed ED admissions between during pandemic and pre-pandemic periods. A total of 8,38,502 admissions were included in the study (5,72,443 vs 2,66,059; pre pandemic period vs during pandemic period, respectively). There was a significant difference between age, gender, ED waiting time, triage color, and hospitalization rates (P < .001) between 2 periods. Comparison of admission international statistical classification of diseases and related health problems 10th revision codes were significantly different between pre-pandemic and pandemic periods for trauma, cardiovascular, neurology, and respiratory codes (P < .001, P < .001, P < .001, P = .024, respectively). The findings of this study suggest that a pandemic affects many mechanisms in the emergency healthcare systems. This influence might have affected the ED admission rates, hospital admission rates, and mortality rates.