The mortality rate of dialysis patients infected with Covid-19 is 75 times higher than that of the general population, a medical report showed.
The Korean Society of Nephrology (KSN)’s Covid-19 Response Task Force analyzed the prognosis of dialysis patients who received Covid-19 treatment at 206 medical institutions between February 2020 and November 2021. Among them, 85 or 22.4 percent died of Covid-19. Their mortality rate was 75 folds higher than 0.3 percent of the general patients, KSN said.
Those who were admitted to the intensive care unit (ICU) had a 64.7 percent death rate.
The average age of hemodialysis patients who died of Covid019 was 66, and most of them were elderly. About two-thirds of the patients complained of fever (49.5 percent) and cough (25.7 percent). Among dialysis patients, those at nursing hospitals had a higher risk of death, admission to ICU, or mechanical ventilation.
KSN attributed such results to dialysis patients’ comorbidities such as diabetes and cardiovascular diseases, a higher proportion of elderly patients, and a high proportion of the immunocompromised. In the U.S. and Europe, the risks of death of Covid-19 patients on dialysis are known to be around 30 percent.
The Omicron wave is pushing up the number of Covid-19 infections in dialysis patients, too.
Dialysis patients have to receive dialysis three times a week, which makes it difficult for them to treat Covid-19 at home or community treatment centers.
In the past, they used to get admitted to regional dialysis hospitals. Now, however, they increasingly get dialysis at outpatient dialysis centers.
If dialysis patients infected with Covid-19 get outpatient dialysis, doctors should monitor the status of patients actively and determine on hospitalization quickly when necessary, experts said. The movement routes of patients and the surrounding the environment should be thoroughly sterilized, too, they added.
KSN President Yang Chul-woo said rapid isolation dialysis and power supply systems are top priorities to reduce the mortality rate of Covid-19-infected hemodialysis patients. Despite the increase in Covid-19 cases among dialysis patients across the nation, the medical system’s preparations are insufficient, he noted.
“To overcome this problem, we need to build a national network of Covid-19 dialysis medical institutions, secure manpower, share information of available dialysis rooms, set up a hotline, and move dialysis patients from regions to regions smoothly,” he emphasized.
The government said it would expand the number of dialysis beds from 347 at 66 institutions to 597 at 84 institutions. It will also increase outpatient dialysis centers to help patients get dialysis treatment regularly.