Study Shows Antibiotics Provide No Benefit to Patients With Non-Severe COVID-19

An observational study published in JAMA Network Open provides evidence that “antibiotics provide no benefit for patients hospitalized with nonsevere COVID-19.” CIDRAP has the news.

The study examined data on over 520,000 U.S. patients over nearly four years and found “no clinically significant difference in outcomes between those who received antibiotics on day 1 of admission and those who didn’t. In fact, patients who received antibiotics had slightly higher odds of poor clinical outcomes.”

More than 80% of hospitalized U.S. COVID patients received antibiotics on admission at the beginning of the pandemic because of “limited treatment options and concerns about bacterial coinfections.” However, only 5% of COVID-19 patients had bacterial coinfections, and an antibiotic thought to perhaps reduce the disease’s severity was found to provide no benefit. By the end of 2023, around 35% of COVID patients in the U.S. were still receiving antibiotics on admission.

A total of 520,405 patients treated at U.S. hospitals were included in the study. 30.8% of the patients were treated with a community-acquired pneumonia (CAP) antibiotic regimen on day 1 of admission. Those patients were more likely to be Hispanic and treated “at hospitals with fewer than 400 beds, hospitals in the South or West, rural hospitals, and non-teaching hospitals.” 18.3% of the patients in the study deteriorated and 4.3% died during their hospitalization. The absolute standardized difference in patient deterioration “did not meet the research team’s predefined criteria for clinical significance.”