Even as COVID-19 was correlated with worse outcomes for people with asthma, the number of people receiving care for asthmatic episodes decreased during the pandemic, according to three studies published yesterday in Thorax.Two focused on the United Kingdom, the first a study in England comparing general practitioner (GP) visits and hospital admissions, and the other a study on asthma-related emergency department (ED) visits and death rates in Scotland and Wales.
The third was a brief communication regarding South Korea's decrease in hospital admissions for multiple respiratory diseases, including asthma.All three observational studies used similar methods, comparing health data during the pandemic with baselines from pre-COVID.