Epidemiological characteristics of all-cause mortality reviewing out-hospital death under the clouds of COVID-19

Abstract

To the Editor: Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has rapidly become a great global infection and brought about a wide range of health consequences, including a high number of deaths due to continuous spread.[1] Wu et al[2] reported that the changes in mortality were heterogeneous across different countries, and this resultantly restricts the common measure of COVID-19 mortality to the particular outcome of in-hospital death and can therefore be regarded as incomplete. In China, the status of COVID-19 has varied from outbreak to proactive prevention due to comprehensive countermeasures such as maintaining social distance and wearing surgical masks. Meanwhile, investigation with community-based samples should contribute to clarifying the doubt about mortality in out-hospital deaths. Moreover, the impact of the pandemic situation on unnatural death remains unclear, particularly about suicide. This may illustrate the adverse effect of the epidemic on people’s state of mind. A retrospective study was designed to analyze the characteristics of all deaths that occurred outside hospitals to obtain a full overview of the broader impact, as well as to lend further plausibility to the specificity of fatal associations according to the need to study all-cause mortality…