Patients with appendicitis during COVID-19 pandemic: a retrospective cohort study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: The Coronavirus Disease 19 (COVID-19) pandemic greatly affected the Quebec healthcare system from spring 2020 onward; the consultation delays that were generated may have delayed the management of urgent intra-abdominal pathologies. Our objective was to evaluate the impact of the pandemic on the length of stay and complications within 30 days of treatment of patients consulting for acute appendicitis (AA) at the Centres intégrés universitaires de santé et de services sociaux (CIUSSS) de l’Estrie-Centre hospitalier universitaire de Sherbrooke (Estrie-CHUS), Quebec, Canada. Methods: The authors conducted a single-center retrospective cohort study on the charts of all patients diagnosed with AA at the CIUSSS de l’Estrie-CHUS between March 13 and June 22, 2019 (control group) and between March 13 and June 22, 2020 (pandemic group). This corresponds to the first wave of COVID-19 in Quebec. Patients included were those with a radiologically confirmed diagnosis of AA. There was no exclusion criteria. Outcomes assessed were length of hospital stay and 30-day complications. Results: The authors analyzed the charts of 209 patients with AA (117 patients in the control group and 92 patients in the pandemic group). No statistically significant difference was observed for the length of stay or the complications between the groups. The only significant difference was the presence of hemodynamic instability on admission (22.2 vs. 41.3%, P =0.004) as well as a trend that did not reach statistical significance regarding the proportions of reoperation before 30 days (0.9 vs. 5.4%, P =0.060). Conclusion: In conclusion, the pandemic did not affect the length of stay of AA managed at the CIUSSS de l’Estrie-CHUS. It is not possible to conclude whether the first wave of the pandemic influenced complications related to AA.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".