Ischaemic stroke associated with COVID-19 and racial outcome disparity in North America

A retrospective study from the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan, China demonstrated an incidence of acute ischaemic stroke of approximately 5% in hospitalised patients with severe disease.1 However, there has been limited evidence on the influence of racial background in stroke outcomes in this pandemic. We report 69 cases of acute stroke in patients positive for SARS-CoV-2, including 27 of African–American background and 42 of other racial backgrounds, including Caucasian, Hispanic and Asian. All patients presented to 14 major hospitals in the USA and Canada, from 14 March 2020 to 14 April 2020. The study was maintained under IRB #s20-00765. All patients had nasopharyngeal swab samples that were positive for SARS-CoV-2 on qualitative reverse-transcriptase-PCR assays. In the following, we present a dichotomised analysis of ischaemic stroke outcomes between patients of African–American background as reported on hospital intake questionnaire versus patients of all other backgrounds. All variables stratified to race (African–American vs others). For continuous variables, when the data are normal, t-test was used and data were presented in the form of mean (SD). If they were not normally distributed, the Wilcoxon rank-sum test was used and the …