• Ryutaro Hirama, Kenichiro Takeda, Seiichiro Sakao, Hajime Kasai, Shizu Miyata, Kohei Shikano, Akira Naito, Mitsuhiro Abe, Takeshi Kawasaki, Ayako Shigeta, Taka-Aki Nakada, Hidetoshi Igari, and Takuji Suzuki.
• Department of Respirology, Graduate School of Medicine, Chiba University, Japan.
• Intern. Med. 2023 Aug 15; 62 (16): 232123282321-2328.

AbstractObjective We evaluated the clinical differences in coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) patients between the sixth wave with the Omicron BA.1/BA.2 dominant variant (from January to April 2022) and seventh wave with the Omicron BA.5 dominant variant (from July to August 2022). Methods This retrospective, single-center, observational study included COVID-19 patients admitted to our institution in the sixth wave (sixth-wave group) and the seventh wave (seventh-wave group). Inter-group comparisons of clinical presentations, the prognosis, and proportion of nosocomial infections were performed. Results A total of 190 patients were included (93 and 97 patients in the sixth- and seventh-wave groups, respectively). While there were no significant differences in severity, significantly more patients developed pneumonia caused by COVID-19 in the sixth-wave group than in the seventh-wave group. Although there was no marked difference in in-hospital deaths, more patients died from COVID-19 in the sixth-wave group than in the seventh-wave group. There were significantly more COVID-19 inpatients with nosocomial infections in the seventh-wave group than in the sixth-wave group. Pneumonia from COVID-19 was significantly more severe in the sixth-wave group than in the seventh-wave group. Conclusion COVID-19 patients in the seventh wave are at a lower risk of pneumonia than those in the sixth wave. However, even in the seventh wave, patients with underlying diseases have a risk of death because of the exacerbation of underlying diseases triggered by COVID-19.

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