Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a respiratory disease with rapid human-to-human transmission caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). Due to the exponential growth of infections, identifying patients with the highest mortality risk early is critical to enable effective intervention and prioritisation of care. Here, we present the COVID-19 early warning system (CovEWS), a risk scoring system for assessing COVID-19 related mortality risk that we developed using data amounting to a total of over 2863 years of observation time from a cohort of 66 430 patients seen at over 69 healthcare institutions. On an external cohort of 5005 patients, CovEWS predicts mortality from 78.8% (95% confidence interval [CI]: 76.0, 84.7%) to 69.4% (95% CI: 57.6, 75.2%) specificity at sensitivities greater than 95% between, respectively, 1 and 192 h prior to mortality events. CovEWS could enable earlier intervention, and may therefore help in preventing or mitigating COVID-19 related mortality.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.