Risk factors associated with disease severity and length of hospital stay in COVID-19 patients

Abstract

Risk factors associated with disease severity and length of hospital stay in COVID-19 patients Dear Editor,We read with interest the article in this journal which revealed the critical role of timely supply of medical resources for COVID-19 patients. 1 The pandemic of COVID-19 has placed an enormous burden on health authorities across the world. The virus, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2; previously known as 2019-nCoV), causes acute respiratory disease with common signs of infection being respiratory symptoms, fever, cough and breathing difficulties. In more severe cases, infection causes pneumonia, lung failure, septic shock, organ failure and risk of death. The WHO reports that 80% of those infected will develop mild symptoms, 14% severe symptoms and 6% will become critically ill. Given the wide clinical spectrum of COVID-19, a key challenge faced by frontline clinical staff is prioritisation of stretched resources. Thus, there is a critical need for robust risk assessment for clinical management.

Clinical Features and Outcomes of Patients With Human Immunodeficiency Virus With COVID-19

“…Initial information from China and evidence accumulated over recent weeks has allowed the identification of some of the risk factors associated with a negative prognosis, includingaging, male gender, hypertension, diabetes mellitus, and cardiovascular, lung and/or kidney diseases. [1][2][3][4] However, little is known about the impact of HIV infection on the clinical outcomes of patients infected with SARS-CoV-2 because, to the best of our knowledge, only case reports or small case series have so far been published. [5][6][7] Treated people living with HIV who have a normal CD4 T cell count and suppressed viral load may not be at increased risk of serious illness, but many also have other conditions that increase their overall risk: almost half of HIV patients are males, aged >50 years, and affected by chronic cardiovascular and lung diseases.…”

Risk Factors of Secondary Infections in Severe and Critical Patients Hospitalized with COVID-19: A Case-Control Study

“…Considering the total number of case patients (n = 56) in our study, we chose six variables based on previous ndings of pneumonia, bloodstream infections and clinical importance. 7,[13][14][15][16] The six variables included sex, age 65 or older, comorbidity (heart diseases), laboratory ndings (hypoproteinemia) on admission and drug therapy (corticosteroids and PPI) during hospitalization. P value less than 0.05 was regarded as statistically signi cant.…”

Temporal radiographic changes in COVID-19 patients: relationship to disease severity and viral clearance

“…We identified consecutive patients with moderate or severe COVID-19 discharged from the general wards of Renmin Hospital of Wuhan University between 5 February 2020 to 14 March 2020. All patients had been diagnosed with COVID-19 according to WHO interim guidance and had radiologic evidence of pneumonia or infiltrates on chest CT scan according 7,10,11 . The same cohort of patients was used to investigate non-radiographic risk factors associated with disease severity and length of hospital stay in COVID-19 11 .…”

“…Demographic, clinical, laboratory and radiographic findings were extracted from electronic medical records 10,11 . The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request and with permission of Renmin Hospital of Wuhan University, Hubei, China.…”