Patients discharged after hospitalisation for COVID-19 have double the risk of another admission or death in the ensuing months than people in the general population, a UK study shows.

Those surviving the pandemic illness are twice as likely to die as patients who have been hospitalised with influenza and five times as likely to die from any cause as the general population, the analysis finds.

The results showed the need for “active follow-up in primary care in the weeks and months following a hospitalisation” for COVID-19, according to the authors from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and the University of Oxford.

Their study drew on linked general practice and hospital data for 25,000 patients admitted for COVID-19 in 2020 (median age 66), plus 123,000 matched population controls and 16,000 patients hospitalised with influenza between 2017 and 2019.