Development of COVID-19 severity assessment score in adults presenting with COVID-19 to the emergency department

• Published in: BMC infectious diseases 2022-06, Vol.22 (1), p.1-576, Article 576
• Main Authors: Subhani, Faysal, Chhotani, Abdul Ahad, Waheed, Shahan, Zahid, Rana Osama, Azizi, Kiran, Buksh, Ahmed Raheem
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Adults; Blood pressure; C-reactive protein; Care and treatment; Comorbidity; Coronaviruses; COVID-19; Data collection; Diagnosis; Disease transmission; Emergency; Emergency medical care; Emergency medical services; Emergency service; Ferritin; Health risk assessment; Hospitals; Intensive care; Laboratories; Leukocytes (neutrophilic); Low income groups; Lymphocytes; Males; Measurement; Methods; Mortality; Oxygen content; Pandemics; Patients; Pneumonia; Prediction score; qSOFA; Variables; Viremia
• ISSN: 1471-2334; 1471-2334
• DOI: 10.1186/s12879-022-07535-8

Critically-ill Covid-19 patients require extensive resources which can overburden a healthcare system already under strain due to a pandemic. A good disease severity prediction score can help allocate resources to where they are needed most. We developed a Covid-19 Severity Assessment Score (CoSAS) to predict those patients likely to suffer from mortalities within 28 days of hospital admission. We also compared this score to Quick Sequential Organ Failure Assessment (qSOFA) in adults. CoSAS includes the following 10 components: Age, gender, Clinical Frailty Score, number of comorbidities, Ferritin level, D-dimer level, neutrophil/lymphocyte ratio, C-reactive Protein levels, systolic blood pressure and oxygen saturation. Our study was a single center study with data collected via chart review and phone calls. 309 patients were included in the study. CoSAS proved to be a good score to predict Covid-19 mortality with an Area under the Curve (AUC) of 0.78. It also proved better than qSOFA (AUC of 0.70). More studies are needed to externally validate CoSAS. CoSAS is an accurate score to predict Covid-19 mortality in the Pakistani population.