Assessment of clinical and virological outcomes of rural and urban populations: COVID-19

OBJECTIVE: To assess the clinical and virological status in urban and rural populations. METHODS: A cross-sectional study was conducted in a tertiary care hospital, Postgraduate Institute of Medical Sciences, Rohtak for a period of six months. Upper respiratory tract (URT) specimens including nasopharyngeal and oropharyngeal swabs were collected from the patients and their contacts and processed by RT-PCR technique for COVID-19 detection. Further, clinical and virological response in both the population were assessed and compared. RESULTS: A total of 37,724 URT samples were tested, out of which 20,144 (53%) samples were from the rural population and 17,580 (47%) from the urban population. Out of the total samples from urban and rural population, COVID-19 positivity was 13.9% in urban population and 6.2% in rural population. Around 86% patients or contacts were asymptomatic in both the rural and urban population and rests were symptomatic 14%. Among the symptomatic patients, sore throat was seen as the most common presenting symptom (95-100%) followed by fever (80-83%), dry cough (55-61%), nasal discharge (18-23%), and breathlessness (3-5%) in both the rural and urban population. CONCLUSION: Our outcomes provide novel facts that the COVID-19 epidemic severely affected both rural and urban populations but with few differences. In our study, positivity rate in case of urban population was 13.9% as compared to 6.2% in rural population. There are two foremost facets that contributed variation in positivity in both the population. First, better immune response in rural population as compared to urban population which can be due to the fact that rural people in India are more exposed to various pathogens during their early lifetime thus, improving their immune status. Second, factor could be elevated population densities in urban areas which can contribute to increased infectiousness thus higher positivity rate. In addition, people living in urban population have to commute more for their work and are exposed to more people throughout the day thus, having more possibility to get infection of COVID-19 as compared to the rural population. To the best of our knowledge, there are no studies conducted on COVID-19, among rural population of Haryana. Hence, this study will allow us to fill the gap in knowledge about the variation in contagion spread and immune response in both rural and urban populations.