RESUMEN
Background. The clinical presentation of 2019 Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCov) infected pneumonia (NCIP) resembles that of other etiologies of community-acquired pneumonia (CAP). We aimed to identify clinical laboratory features to distinguish NCIP from CAP. Methods. We compared the ability of the hematological and biochemical features of 84 patients with NCIP at hospital admission and 316 patients with CAP. Parameters independently predictive of NCIP were calculated by multivariate logistic regression. The receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves were generated and the area under the ROC curve (AUC) was measured to evaluate the discriminative ability. Results. Most hematological and biochemical indexes of patients with NCIP were significantly different from patients with CAP. Nine laboratory parameters were identified to be highly predictive of a diagnosis of NCIP by multivariate analysis. The AUCs demonstrated good discriminatory ability for red cell distribution width (RDW) with an AUC of 0.88 and Hemoglobin (HGB) with an AUC of 0.82. Red blood cell (RBC), albumin (ALB), eosinophil (EO), hematocrit (HCT), alkaline phosphatase (ALP), and white blood cell (WBC) had fair discriminatory ability. Combinations of any two parameters performed better than did the RDW alone. Conclusions. Routine laboratory examinations may be helpful for the diagnosis of NCIP. Application of laboratory tests may help to optimize the use of isolation rooms for patients when they present with unexplained febrile respiratory illnesses.