News
Trends in the number of patients with new COVID-19 variant. By the 7th wave, overall outpatient number resurgence trend is confirmed, but not back to pre-COVID-19 levels
- January 31, 2023
Medical Data Vision Co., Ltd. (Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo; President: Hiroyuki Iwasaki), a company that promotes the networking of medical information, examined the number of outpatients and inpatients before and after the new COVID-19 pandemic, and found that the total number of outpatients was showing a recovery tendency by the 7th wave (end of last September), but had not reached the pre-COVID-19 level. In addition, since the total number of outpatients includes outpatient visits with a certain number of them being COVID-19 close contact cases, it will be necessary to continue to check the number of patients in the future.
To perform this survey, we compiled and analyzed hospital data (April 2018-September 2022) from our hospital management analysis system, MDV Act, in 344 facilities for which we had data for all months of the survey period. These data were based on the number of patients for whom acute general hospitalization fee Type-1 was calculated during the target period. For disease codes, we used major diagnosis group (MDC) 2.
The results of the survey confirmed changes in the total number of outpatients before the COVID-19 pandemic (April 2018 to March 2020) compared with the period of COVID-19 (April 2020 to September 2022) so approximately three years, indicating that for each increase in the number of severe COVID-19 cases from wave 1 to wave 7, there was an apparent reduction in the number of patients going for visits to the hospital. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the total monthly outpatients was averaging 4,017,224, but in the period of COVID-19, it fell down to 3,743,259 (a decrease of 6.8%).
Inpatients with gastro-intestinal conditions are rising again, while the level of inpatients with respiratory conditions remain sluggish.
In terms of hospital admissions by disease, gastrointestinal and cardiovascular conditions are showing signs of resurgence, while respiratory conditions level stays low.
Respiratory cases averaged 22,816 per month before the COVID-19 pandemic but fell to 16,720 (down 26.7%) after the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak.
On the other hand, the number of gastrointestinal cases were 45,262 before the COVID-19 pandemic and fell to 41,707 (down 7.9%) in period of COVID-19, while the number of cardiovascular cases was 21,783 before the COVID-19 pandemic and fell to 19,618 (down 9.9%) in the same period.