The need for improved discharge criteria for hospitalised patients with COVID-19—implications for patients in long term care facilities

Abstract

In the COVID-19 pandemic, patients who are older and residents of long term care facilities (LTCF) are at greatest risk of worse clinical outcomes. We reviewed discharge criteria for hospitalised COVID-19 patients from ten countries with the highest incidence of COVID-19 cases as of 26th July 2020. Five countries (Brazil, Mexico, Peru, Chile and Iran) had no discharge criteria; the remaining five (United States of America, India, Russia, South Africa and the United Kingdom) had discharge guidelines with large inter-country variability. India and Russia recommend discharge for a clinically recovered patient with two negative reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) tests 24 hours apart; the USA offers either a symptom based strategy—clinical recovery and ten days after symptom onset, or the same test-based strategy. The UK suggests that patients can be discharged when patients have clinically recovered; South Africa recommends discharge 14 days after symptom onset if clinically stable. We recommend a unified, simpler discharge criteria, based on current studies which suggest that most SARS-CoV-2 loses its infectivity by 10 days post-symptom onset. In asymptomatic cases, this can be taken as 10 days after the first positive PCR result. Additional days of isolation beyond this should be left to the discretion of individual clinician. This represents a practical compromise between unnecessarily prolonged admissions and returning highly infectious patients back to their care facilities, and is of particular importance in older patients discharged to LTCFs, residents of which may be at greatest risk of transmission and worse clinical outcomes.