Report reveals the cost of treating Covid patients in hospital in Spain

Every patient admitted to hospital with Covid-19 in Spain in 2020, cost the health service 5,822.22 euros, which is 15% more than the average cost for patients with any other illness (5,029.60 euros). In the case of Covid patients who needed treatment in intensive care, the cost rose to 18,926.49 euros.

The Spanish health service looked after 248,448 coronavirus patients in hospital in 2020, and one in eleven cases had to be cared for in intensive care, according to the annual report from the Ministry of Health.

Covid patients put the hospital system under major pressure, and the average stay was 11 days in wards, and 15 days for those in intensive care, which are short due to the number of people that died.

The figures show that those who did not die in hospital were released after an average of 26.47 days. The mortality rate of patients admitted with coronavirus was 16%, and 31% for those in intensive care. In total, the number of ICU patients with Covid that died was 7, 144 people, nearly one-third of the total of 22,155.

However, the report also provides a paradoxical piece of data: despite the high number of patients admitted due to Covid, the overall cost of hospitalisations in 2020 (16,512,845,736.80 euros) was lower than that of 2019 (17,829,108,780.21 euros), due to the number of ‘high-cost’ procedures that were delayed due to hospital pressure.

The cost of other treatments:
Apart from the cost of treating Covid patients in hospitals, the report also looks at the cost of other patients. The most common were vaginal births, which had an average cost of 2,502.80 euros, and pneumonia at 4,355 euros.

Transplants were the most expensive procedures, especially heart transplants, which cost 90,101 euros on average, and kidney transplants (the most common), with an average cost of 23,960.60 euros.