Covid, study reveals ‘weekend effect’: + 6% deaths on weekends

In Covid, on average, more people die on Saturdays and Sundays than on the days from Monday to Friday. It has happened from the beginning of the pandemic to today all over the world, including Italy, with the sole exception of Germany. To discover and measure what they call the “weekend effect” were Fizza Manzoor and Donald Redelmeier of the University of Toronto, Canada, who analyzing all the Covid-19 deaths registered on the World Health Organization database from March 7, 2020 to 7 March 2022 calculated “an average number of deaths globally 6% higher on weekends: 8,532 deaths” on Saturday and Sunday, “against 8,083” on the other days: a difference of 449 lives. The study will be presented at the European Congress of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases (Eccmid), scheduled in Lisbon in Portugal from 23 to 26 April. According to the authors, the largest increase in deaths from Covid during the weekends was observed in the United States (on average 1,483 deaths on weekend days vs 1,220 in others, + 22%), followed by Brazil (1,061 vs 823, +29). %), United Kingdom (239 vs 215, + 11%) and Canada (56 vs 48, + 17%). The only exception was Germany, which reported “a significantly lower average number of deaths on weekend days than the others (137 versus 187, -27%)”. “The bureaucratic delays of the weekends do not alone explain these numbers – comments Manzoor – nor do they explain why the increase in deaths on weekend days was so substantial in the US and not observed in Germany. Instead, it is probable that the fine effect week is also due to a lack of personnel, know-how and experience. Furthermore, our results suggest that this problem is not being resolved, despite the improvement in the knowledge “of Sars-CoV-2 infection by healthcare professionals and therefore “the performance of health systems during the pandemic”. Although the work has limitations that the scientists themselves admit, citing for example possible cases of failed or incorrect loading of data on Saturdays and Sundays, the invitation is to plan “further studies, with detailed clinical data, to investigate the causes of the risk of death from Covid-19 on weekends and other days of the week. “To conduct the work, the researchers calculated globally the average number of Covid deaths on weekend days, comparing it with that reported on the days from Monday to Friday. They then repeated the analyzes for the 10 countries with the most cases of Sars-CoV-2 infections (USA, UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Russia, India, Brazil and Canada), correcting the results obtained by taking into account the holidays. national and bridges. For the 2 years considered, the authors indicate a total of 5,983,471 deaths and 444,961,484 cases of Covid-19. And on balance, they conclude that “around the world there were on average 449 more deaths from Covid on weekends than on other days”. Considering that in 24 months health care has learned to better understand the enemy Sars -CoV-2 and to counter it, the scientists then performed a more detailed assessment. That is, they compared the deaths on the weekend days of the first pandemic year (March 2020-March 2021) with those of the second (March 2021-March 2022), discovering that the weekend effect remained in any case, albeit decreasing: from 641 additional deaths in the days of Saturday and Sunday calculated in the first period (7,825 against 7,184), there was an increase of 257 deaths (9,239 vs 8,982) in the second. Not even the various pandemic waves influenced the weekend effect that much, which was confirmed regardless of the overall mortality level of the different periods: the deaths of the weekend days were +426 in the weeks with the most deaths, and +476 in those with fewer deaths. Tightening the target on 7 days of the week, the average deaths calculated by the authors are equal to 7,219 on Mondays, 6,825 on Tuesdays, 8,070 on Wednesdays, 9,230 on Thursdays, 9,086 on Fridays, 8,850 on Saturdays and 8,071 on Sundays. Therefore, if the average of the 2 days of the weekend is greater than that calculated on the other 5 days, at the level of individual days the highest average number of deaths would fall on Thursday, the lowest on Tuesday.