The New Coronavirus Disease (NCCD-19) has presented itself as an unprecedented challenge to global public health, with the World Health Organization declaring a pandemic emergency in March 2020. The pandemic has challenged the response capacity of health systems and affected the ability of hospitals to provide care, which may have influenced hospitalizations for other causes unrelated to respiratory dysfunctions due to COVID-19, such as circulatory system diseases. These, in turn, cause great impact on public health, because they can generate changes that culminate in sick leave and/or the inability to maintain work activity, besides considerably increasing hospital costs due to the need for expensive hospitalizations, surgeries, and medications.

To compare hospitalizations for circulatory system diseases in Bahia before and after the emergence of COVID-19 and to observe the most frequent circulatory diseases in 2022 (the year in which the end of the COVID-19 pandemic was decreed.

This is a retrospective cohort study, of descriptive nature and quantitative approach, based on secondary data, using hospital morbidity data of hospitalizations in Bahia, obtained through the Sistema de Informações Hospitalares do Sistema Único de Saúde (SIH-SUS), available at DATASUS. Data from the pre-pandemic period (2017 to 2019) were compared with the post-pandemic period (2020 to 2022). Data were organized and analyzed using Excel 2010 software.

Between the years 2017 to 2019, 213,632 hospitalizations for circulatory system diseases were recorded, this number represents 8.7% of the total hospitalizations that there were in the State of Bahia in this period. Between the years 2020 to 2022, the recorded number of hospitalizations for diseases of the circulatory system was 201,610, representing 8.9% of the total hospitalizations in the State of Bahia. Despite the reduction in the absolute number of hospitalizations by 5.6%, the percentage of patients hospitalized for circulatory diseases increased from 8.7% to 8.9% when evaluating the total hospitalizations by all causes. In the year 2022, hospitalizations for circulatory system conditions reached the number of 72,722, with stroke, heart failure and acute myocardial infarction being the most frequent, with respectively 20.6%, 18.4% and 12.9% of the total.

The numbers presented and analyzed show a difference, albeit discrete, in the behavior of hospitalizations for circulatory system diseases in the state of Bahia. Moreover, the three circulatory diseases with the highest number of hospitalizations have great potential to generate disabilities, with these patients requiring, therefore, multiprofessional assistance. Thus, the data presented reiterate the impact of circulatory system diseases for public health in Brazil and point to the need for a deeper and more detailed observation to understand the real impact that the pandemic of COVID-19 brought to the epidemiological scenario.

The data presented has the potential to reinforce the importance of cardiovascular disease prevention, reducing the deleterious impact of functionality, and may generate important health care spending reduction impacts.