Critical complications of COVID-19: A descriptive meta-analysis study

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a novel coronavirus infection that has rapidly spread worldwide, causing a pandemic. The main objective of this meta-analysis was to evaluate the prevalence of the most common symptoms and complications of COVID-19. All relevant studies on the clinical complications of COVID-19 have been identified by searching two web databases (i.e., PubMed and Scopus). Afterward, the relevant data were extracted from the selected studies, and then analyzed by the STATA (Version 14) random-effects model. The 30 studies selected for our meta-analysis covered 6,389 infected patients. The prevalence rates of the most common symptoms were as follows: fever: 84.30% (95% CI: 77.13-90.37; I2 = 97.74%), cough: 63.01% (95% CI: 57.63-68.23; I2 = 93.73%), dyspnea: 37.16% (95% CI: 27.31-47.57%; I2 = 98.32%), fatigue: 34.22% (95% CI: 26.29-42.62; I2 = 97.29%), and diarrhea: 11.47% (95% CI: 6.96-16.87; I2 = 95.58%). Moreover, the most prevalent complications were found to be acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) with 33.15% (95% CI: 23.35-43.73; I2 = 98.56%), arrhythmia with 16.64% (95% CI: 9.34-25.5; I2 = 92.29%), acute cardiac injury with 15.68% (95% CI: 11.1-20.97; I2 = 92.45%), heart failure with 11.50% (95% CI: 3.45-22.83; I2 = 89.48%), and acute kidney injury (AKI) with 9.87% (95% CI: 6.18-14.25; I2 = 95.64%). In this study, we assessed the prevalence of the main clinical complications of COVID-19, and found that following respiratory complications, cardiac and renal complications are the most common clinical complications of COVID-19.