High-power, short-duration atrial ablation was as safe and effective as the conventional ablation. Compared with the conventional 40 W/30 s setting, 50 and 60 W ablation for 5 s achieved transmurality and had fewer complications.

P oor outcomes have been reported recently in patients with pneumonia associated with coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) and cardiac injury. 1-3 These reports did not characterize patients as dead or discharged from hospital because the COVID-19 pandemic had not completed its course at the time of reporting. 1-3 The initial findings suggested that patients admitted to the intensive care unit (ICU) had an arrhythmia burden of 44.4%; 4 however, the exact nature of these arrhythmias was not characterized. Knowing now that cardiac injury is an important predictor of death, characterizing arrhythmias and determining independent predictors of outcome may allow health care providers to implement aggressive therapy and assign accurate probabilities for the outcome, which can be used to identify high-risk groups. In addition, such data would assist in decisions on discharge from the emergency department, therapy with QT-prolonging drugs, rhythm monitoring and triage of ventilators and ICU beds. 5 In Wuhan, China, the initial outbreak of COVID-19 has run its full course, which provides an opportunity to characterize outcomes and inform strategy for Europe and North America. As such, we evaluated 170 patients from Wuhan who had cardiac injury that was diagnosed early during their admission for pneumonia associated with COVID-19 for the outcomes of death, discharge and arrhythmias. We also characterized the effect of QT-prolonging drugs in these patients. We determined independent predictors of death and mechanical ventilation in this population with cardiac injury and severe COVID-19. Methods Study participants, setting and design Infection caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) was diagnosed using contact history, clinical symptoms and a positive result for SARS-CoV-2 using nucleotide polymerase