Population characteristics
Figure 1 illustrates the history of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic in Romania from February 26 until April 20, including dates, number of fatalities and number of the missing subjects due to incomplete information. The Romanian COVID-19 mortality study has a sample size of 432 patients with complete data regarding gender, age and comorbidities. It consists of a multi-case, multi-center approach focused on the mortality frequency and of a case-case evaluation with the aim of comparing hospital-pneumonia and COVID-19 mortality (see the section on the study design for the details). Our goal is to investigate the association between the mortality and comorbidities, gender, age and hospital-pneumonia based on the statistical methods presented in detail in the last section of the present article. Since the Romanian population mainly consists of 84.1% Ethnic Romanians and of a small Hungarian minority that makes up 5.4% of the population demographics that both belong to the white ethnicity, an effect of the ethnicity was not considered in this article17.
Figure 1 History of SARS-COV-2 pandemic in Romania up to April 20.
First, the basic descriptive statistics about our sample are presented. There are 282 (65.3%) men and 150 (34.7%) women with a statistically significant difference between the size of these two groups (Table S1). The general mean age is 67 years, with an SD of 13.1, and the median value is 68 (Table S2).
Sources of infection with deaths due to COVID-19 virus were reported in 36 counties in Romania with significant case concentration in Suceava-county n. = 67 (15.51%), Arges-county n. = 44 (10.19%) and Hunedoara-county n. = 41 (9.49%). Details regarding the spatial distribution of the distinct diseases and aggregated groups of diseases are displayed in Table S6 and Table S7 in the supplementary material.
A total of 170 different conditions and 20 groups of diseases were identified in the study, with a broader diversity of 149 conditions for men over 107 conditions for women. The diseases with the highest prevalence in the sample are hypertension, obesity, diabetes and chronic kidney disease as well as diseases of the circulatory system and nutritional or metabolic disorders.
The sample size of the pneumonia study is equal to 874 persons with complete data as to gender, age and comorbidities. The sample includes 492 (56.3%) men and 382 (43.7%) women, the average age is 73.3 years, with an SD of 13.5, and the median age is 76.