COVID Patients Who Present to Your UCC Are More Likely to Be Hospitalized (Don’t Take It Personally)

Who knows what the next COVID-19 “season” may bring in terms of incidence and severity? The virus has been completely unpredictable, to date—although new data are revealing interesting likelihoods, including at least one specific to urgent care. According to a new article published by BMC Infectious Diseases, COVID patients who present to acute unscheduled episodic care (AUEC, which included both emergency rooms and urgent care centers) are more likely to require hospitalization compared with those who present via minimal contact enrollment (MC, defined for purposes of the article as “electronic contact from test center lists of positive patients”). The numbers were crunched through secondary analysis of the ACTIV-4B trial, conducted at 52 U.S. sites between September 2020 and August 2021. Primary, composite outcome was cardiopulmonary hospitalizations, symptomatic venous thromboembolism, myocardial infarction, stroke, transient ischemic attack, systemic arterial thromboembolism, or death among stable outpatients stratified by enrollment setting (AUEC vs MC). Ultimately, the patients presenting to through AUEC were found to be 10 times more likely to experience a primary outcome. After Cox regression analysis adjustments, the AUEC group “remained at significant risk of the primary composite outcome” with a hazard ration of 3.40.