Abstract
Background: Respiratory symptoms are a characteristic feature present in covid-19 patients, and they usually range from mild to severe. Asthma is a chronic disease involving the airways that carry air in and out of the lungs. However, there is limited resources that discuss the relation between asthma and prevalence of COVID-19.
Aims: Identify the impact of covid-19 on asthmatic patients.
Methodology: This is a descriptive cross-sectional study that was conducted to study the impact of COVID-19 on asthmatic patients, which was conducted using a prepared questionnaire which was distributed online among 300 patients with asthma. After collecting the data, MS Excel was used for data entry while SPSS version 24 was used for data analysis.
Results: In this study, we were able to collect data from 311 asthmatic patients in response to our questionnaire. Most of the asthmatic patients were females (67.2%) with a ratio of females: males of 2:1. Moreover, most patients thought that they control their asthma well and only 13.5% indicated that they had frequent emergency visits because of asthma. The prevalence of COVID-19 in asthmatic patients was 64.3 % where a third of patients needed to go to hospital because of their bad condition, 12.6 % needed to be hospitalized in ICU and 56.4 % needed oxygen. Moreover, severity of COVID-19 symptoms and outcomes are related to the control of asthma where better control of asthma was associated with better outcomes including lower need for ICU admission and oxygen need.
Conclusion: Prevalence of COVID-19 in asthmatic patients was much higher than the general population especially in female patients aged between 31-40 years old. Moreover, COVID-19 had more severe outcomes in asthmatic patients including higher prevalence of ICU admission and oxygen need. Poorer outcomes of COVID-19 were associated with poor control of asthma.