The following is a summary of “Population-level trends in asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease emergency department visits and hospitalizations before and during the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic in the United States,” published in the December 2023  issue of Allergy & Immunology by Gaffney, et al.

Researchers have found that chronic lung disease flare-ups have improved in many places since the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak started. For a study, researchers sought to look at how COVID-19 affects asthma and COPD flare-ups across the US community, focusing on poor areas. From 2016 to 2020, they looked at county-level data on asthma and COPD hospitalizations for emergency care, using hospitalizations for myocardial infarction as a comparison. They connected this to data on lower respiratory disease deaths at the county level. They found the rates of visits to the emergency department (ED), stays, and deaths and then used linear regressions to look at changes while considering fixed effects for year and county.

As an extra study, they used the 2016–2020 National Hospital Ambulatory Medical Care Survey to find out how often people with asthma, COPD, or any other illness went to the ED nationwide. Their data at the county level came from 685 counties in 13 states. Rates of all of these things went down in 2020. They found big drops in the number of people with asthma and COPD going to the emergency room (for example, a 21.5 per 10,000-person drop in COPD ED visits; 95% CI, −23.8 to −19.1), but only small drops in the number of people who ended up in the hospital and died from chronic lower respiratory disease. Poor areas had higher rates of respiratory illness at the start and bigger total drops in some outcomes.

The National Hospital Ambulatory Medical Care Survey looked at 90,808 ED visits. During the pandemic, asthma ED visits fell by 33% per year, and COPD visits fell by 51%. Overall, ED visits fell by only 7%. At the same time that the COVID-19 outbreak started, fewer people with asthma and COPD were going to the emergency room. Figuring out how this decrease works could help with future attempts to stop flare-ups.

Source: sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1081120623005914