A total of 248,448 people were hospitalized in the first year of the pandemic and one in eleven required an ICU, where the average cost rose to 18,926 euros, according to data from the Ministry of Health
Each covid-19 patient hospitalized in 2020 represented a cost of 5,822.22 euros, 15% more than the average of those admitted for any disease (5,029.60 euros), and the figure rose to 18,926.49 euros between who needed intensive care. In total, the National Health System registered 248,448 hospitalizations for coronavirus that year and one of eleven cases required admission to the ICU, according to data from the 2020 Specialized Health Care Activity Registry, an annual report from the Ministry of Health that in its new edition puts numbers to the extraordinary healthcare pressure that hospitals suffered due to covid in the first year of the pandemic.
The coronavirus patients represented a huge strain on the hospital system. The average stay of the patients in the hospital was eleven days (fifteen in the case of intensive care), and those who did not die in the health center and were discharged had an average stay of 26.47 days. The mortality of patients admitted for coronavirus was 16%, twice as high for those who required ICU (31%). In addition, 7,144 patients died in intensive care from covid, almost one in three (31.25%) of those admitted to this type of unit (22,155).
However, the Health report offers a paradoxical figure. Despite the large number of patients admitted for covid, the overall cost of hospitalizations in 2020 (16,512,845,736.80 euros) was lower than in 2019 (17,829,108,780.21 euros).
Beyond covid, the document studies the cost of hospitalization for other processes. The most frequent are care for vaginal delivery, which includes instrumental deliveries, and which had an average cost of 2,502.8 euros, and pneumonia, which cost an average of 4,355 euros.
The process with the highest average cost was transplants, and among them, the one that required the most money was heart transplants, 90,101 euros on average. And each kidney, the most frequent transplant, represents an average cost of 23,920.6 euros.
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