A quick prediction tool for unfavourable outcome in COVID-19 inpatients: Development and internal validation.

Abstract

As COVID-19 pandemic continues to escalate, hospitals around the world confront with the need to attend an increasing number of patients. Therefore, we read with much interest the recent study published in the Journal of Infection by Galloway JB et al., reinforcing the importance of stratifying patients to ease their management and their incorporation to potential clinical trials1. For this purpose, these authors developed a valuable and complex risk score based on twelve parameters, including, among others, age, gender, diabetes mellitus, hypertension, and chronic lung disease. Since knowing the risk of clinical deterioration can assist medical decisions about appropriate level of care, predictive models for COVID-19 are becoming notably frequent. However, many of them are notably biased, non-validated, or present a construction lacking in clarity2,3. Moreover, they often conclude that male older patients with comorbidities are more likely to experience unfavourable outcomes4,5, even when such determinants are already well-known predictors of worse result in community-acquired pneumonia6. Although the medical assessment of patients must always address demographics and underlying comorbidities, it is known that the evaluation of disease severity and prognosis should not only depend on the above-mentioned risk markers.