A qualitative study of COVID-19 related reasons for delayed presentation of patients with chest pain during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Introduction
In previous pandemics such as the Ebola virus outbreak in West Africa, it has been observed that patients with non-pandemic related complaints, delay their presentation to hospital. Similarly, delayed presentation of patients with chest pain during the COVID-19 pandemic has been documented. This qualitative study identified the COVID-19 related reasons which lead to this delay.


Methods
A qualitative study based on 10 individual patient interviews. Half of these were conducted at a public hospital emergency centre (EC) and the other half at a private EC.


Results
A variety of psychosocial factors were identified as themes for delayed presentation. Interestingly, the fear of contracting COVID-19 at the hospital was not found to be an important theme in our study. Rather, confusion around hospital protocols during the pandemic was identified as a recurrent theme.


Discussion
This study found that confusion about COVID-19 hospital protocols was the major pandemic related delaying factor. A number of themes unrelated to COVID-19 were also identified.


African relevance
•As of 31 August 2021, South Africa has more than 2,7 million cases of COVID-19 with more than 81,000 deaths.•Cardiovascular disease causes 13% of deaths in sub-Saharan Africa.•Delayed presentation of patients with non-pandemic related symptoms, is often reported as a concern in countries of the developing world.
['Dreyer|Hanlie|H|', 'De Oliveira|Katya|K|', 'Lalloo|Vidya|V|', 'Engelbrecht|Andreas|A|']
Qualitative study COVID-19 Delayed presentation Chest pain Acute coronary syndrome (ACS)