But the numbers reflected trends that were reported from other countries at earlier stages of the outbreak. Of the hospitalized COVID-19 patients in the CDC study, 89.3% had underlying medical conditions. The most common of those was hypertension, in 49.7% of patients, followed by obesity, chronic metabolic disease (like diabetes), chronic lung disease (like asthma) and cardiovascular disease.
In terms of age and gender, 74.5% of patients were 50 or older, and 54.4% were male.
The report also shows that, while the highest overall percentage of hospitalized patients were white (45%), the percentage of black patients (33%) was much higher than the percentage of African Americans in the population as a whole. In the geographical areas covered by the study, 59% of the population is white, the report said, and 18% is black, “suggesting that black populations might be disproportionately affected by Covid-19.”
In the included region, men generally represent 49% of the population and women 51%, which effectively further widens the disproportionate percentage of men requiring hospitalization.
The report emphasized that its findings would need to be confirmed by more data.
Overall, 4.6 people per 100,000 have been hospitalized in the area studied. But the rate jumped to 13.8 per 100,000 for people 65 and older, which the CDC found was higher than the rates for recent influenza patients. The study compared data from the first four weeks of the past five seasons of influenza, and found those hospitalization rates ranged from 0.1 per 100,000 people between the ages of 5 to 17, up to between 2.2 and 5.4 for people 85 and older. For COVID-19, the hospitalization rate for patients 85 or older is 17.2 per 100,000.
