Ischaemic stroke in the time of coronavirus disease 2019

Background and purpose Stroke assistance is facing changes and new challenges since COVID‐19 became pandemic. A variation on the patient influx might be one of the greater concerns, due to fewer people coming to emergency departments or coming too late. However, no data quantifying this have been published until now. The aim was to analyse the impact of the COVID‐19 epidemic outbreak on hospital stroke admissions and their characteristics in our region. Methods The data of every patient admitted to any hospital of our healthcare system with a diagnosis of ischaemic stroke between 30 December 2019 and 19 April 2020 were reviewed. Demographic and clinical data were recorded and compared between periods before and after the setting of the state of emergency secondary to the COVID‐19 outbreak. Results In total, 354 patients with ischaemic stroke were admitted in our study period. There was a weekly average of 27.5 cases before the setting of the state of emergency against 12 afterwards (P