Recovery time of patients infected from COVID-19 in Pakistan

Abstract

The present study was aimed to improve the general public understanding of COVID-19 pandemic, current study aims to estimate the recovery time of patients infected from COVID-19. Data for this retrospective study was taken from the Saidu group of teaching hospitals district Swat, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan. The study period was form March 24, 2020, to August 25, 2020. A total of 372 COVID-19 positive cases from March 2020 to August 2020 were included in the study. The entry point of each patient was the date of admission in the hospital and the event of interest was the recovery of a patient from COVID-19. Variable of interest were date of admission, date of discharge, age and gender for all patients. All 372 patients were COVID-19 positive recorded between the first positive to the first negative SARS-CoV-2 PCR test results. The Kaplan Meier estimator was used to obtain the recovery time of patients in days from COVID-19 diagnosis. Present study estimated average time of recovery from COVID-19 in district Swat which was 8 days with 0.95% C.I. (7-9) days. The difference between recovery time for males and females was not significant but the difference between recovery time for age groups was significant using the log-rank test.