• Mehdi Hasani Azad, Farid Khorrami, Mitra Kazemi Jahromi, Nader Alishan Karami, Mehraban Shahi, Nasrin Davari Dolatabadi, Golnaz Sadat Mousavi, and Abbas Sheikhtaheri.
• Infectious and Tropical Diseases Research Center, Hormozgan Health Institute, Hormozgan University of Medical Sciences, Bandar Abbas, Iran.
• Arch Iran Med. 2021 May 1; 24 (5): 434-444.

BackgroundTo better manage the COVID-19 pandemic, it is necessary to carefully study information about patients with COVID-19. Objective: To report clinical and epidemiological characteristics of COVID-19 patients in southern Iran.MethodsThis cross-sectional retrospective study was conducted based on data extracted from the COVID-19 registry of Hormozgan. Data from patients with confirmed COVID-19 based on CT-scan results or real-time reverse transcriptase-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) results until September 25, 2020, were analyzed for this study (2351 inpatients). We reported demographics, signs and symptoms on admission, comorbidities, and treatments, as well as clinical outcomes, hospital stay, and intensive care unit (ICU) admission.ResultsMost of patients were men (1235/2351; 52.5%) and the most common signs and symptoms included cough (1343/2351; 57.1%), shortness of breath (1224/2351; 52.1%) and fever. The most common comorbidities included hypertension (410/2351 (17.4%), diabetes (343/2351; 14.6%) and chronic cardiac disease (282/2351; 12%). Also, 228 patients (9.7%) were hospitalized in the ICU. The mortality rate was 12.5% (295/2351) among all patients and 64.5% (147/228) in ICU wards, respectively. The number of cases with comorbidities including hypertension, chronic cardiac disease, diabetes, chronic neurological disorders, chronic kidney disease, chronic hematologic disease, malignant neoplasm, moderate or severe liver disease, dementia and fauvism in the ICU was significantly higher than the general wards.ConclusionMost characteristics of our patients were similar to those reported in other studies; however, our patients were younger and suffered from a less severe disease. The mortality rate in the ICU was higher than other studies.© 2021 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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