Patients with non-communicable disease and without a COVID-19 diagnosis admitted to the medical ward of the Mbarara Regional Referral Hospital in Mbarara, Uganda between Between March 1, 2019, and August 31, 2021

We conducted a retrospective manual chart review of all individuals admitted to the medical ward at MRRH during the study period. We included all individuals 18 years and older who carried a history of or were admitted for an NCD. We defined NCDs as non-infectious cardiovascular, endocrine, renal, gastrointestinal, pulmonary, hepatic, neurologic, hematologic, dermatologic, and mental health disease in addition to malignancy and acute poisoning. We excluded individuals that tested positive for COVID-19 or tested negative but were deemed high risk for COVID-19 per Ugandan COVID-19 test protocols, as these patients were admitted to the COVID-19 ward rather than the general medical ward. Trained reviewers abstracted individual data including demographics (age, sex, district of residence, occupation, level of education, smoking and alcohol use), comorbid conditions (history of cardiovascular, renal, and lung diseases, stroke, heart failure, malignancy, human immunodeficiency virus [HIV]), medications (prior to admission, received during admission, and prescribed upon discharge), clinical data (vital signs and laboratory values on day of admission), and clinical outcomes (discharge, in-hospital death, transfer to the intensive care unit [ICU], transfer to outside facilities). Reviewers were all medical school students. We also recorded alcohol-related admissions, which were defined as acute alcohol intoxication, alcohol withdrawal, or acute alcoholic hepatitis without evidence of cirrhosis. At discharge, individuals often leave the hospital with the results of their laboratory and radiology results to keep for their records and there are often no retained copies of this data in the hospital. Additionally, labs often cost money, and there are many patients who do not get laboratory testing done during a hospital admission. We defined “labs drawn during admission” as those individuals with laboratory values in the patient chart during data collection.