Abstract

Introduction: Coronavirus is the major public health problems of this globe, and currently, more than 85 million people were getting infected, and more than 1.8 million died of coronavirus globally as of 05 January 2021, and the figures are still increasing rapidly. Even though the Ethiopian government established a numbers of treatment centers, there are limited data on how long patients will stay in treatment centers to recover from COVID-19. This study aimed to assess the median time to recovery from COVID-19 and its predictors among COVID -19 patients admitted in WURH treatment center, Western Ethiopia.

Methods: This was a hospital-based retrospective cohort study conducted among 263 adult patients admitted with COVID-19 in WURH treatment center from March 29, 2020 through September 30 2020. Time to recovery from COVID-19 was defined as the time from patient is diagnosed positive for COVID 19 to the patient diagnosed negative. Epidata version 3.2 was used for data entry, and STATA version 14 for analysis. A Cox proportional hazards regression model was fitted to determine factors associated with recovery time. A variable with P-value ≤ 0.25 at bivariable Cox regression analysis were selected for multivariable Cox proportional model. Multivariable Cox regression model with 95% CI and AHR was used to identify a significant predictor of time to recovery from COVID-19 P-value < 0.05.

Results: The mean age of patient was 36.8 (SD± 10.68) years. At the end of follow up, two hundred twenty seven observations were developed an event (recovered) with median time to recovery of 20 days with IQR of 12-32 days. The overall incidence rate of recovery was of 4.38 per 100 (95% CI: 3.84, 4.99) person-days observations. Age of patients (AHR=1.59, 95% CI: 1.02, 2.49), oxygen supplementation (AHR=1.70, 95% CI: 1.16, 2.49), presence of fever (AHR=1.78, 95% CI:  1.21, 2.62), and comorbidity (AHR= 0.56, 95% CI, 0.34, 0.90) were found to have statistically significant association with recovery time during multivariable cox proportional regression analysis.

Conclusion and recommendations: In general the median recovery time of patients with COVID-19 cases 20 days and factors such as younger age group, presence of fever and using oxygen and comorbidity were independent predictors of delayed recovery from COVID-19. Intervention to further reduce recovery time at treatment center has to focus on patients those shows symptoms and with comorbidities.

Keywords: COVID-19, recovery time, predictors, Ethiopia