A New Rapid Approach for Predicting Death in Coronavirus Patients: The Development and Validation of the COVID-19 Risk-Score in Fars Province (CRSF)

ABSTRACT

Background: Patients who are identified to be at a higher risk of mortality from COVID-19 should receive better treatment and monitoring. This study aimed to propose a simple yet accurate risk assessment tool to help decision-making in the management of the COVID-19 pandemic. Methods: From Jul to Nov 2020, 5454 patients from Fars Province, Iran, diagnosed with COVID-19 were enrolled. A multiple logistic regression model was trained on one dataset (training set n=4183) and its prediction performance was assessed on another dataset (testing set n=1271). This model was utilized to develop the COVID-19 risk-score in Fars (CRSF). Results: Five final independent risk factors including gender (male OR=1.37), age (60-80 OR=2.67 and >80 OR=3.91), SpO2 (≤85% OR=7.02), underlying diseases (yes OR=1.25), and pulse rate (<60 OR=2.01 and >120 OR=1.60) were significantly associated with in-hospital mortality. The CRSF formula was obtained using the estimated regression coefficient values of the aforementioned factors. The point values for the risk factors varied from 2 to 19 and the total CRSF varied from 0 to 45. The ROC analysis showed that the CRSF values of ≥15 (high-risk patients) had a specificity of 73.5%, sensitivity of 76.5%, positive predictive value of 23.2%, and negative predictive value (NPV) of 96.8% for the prediction of death (AUC=0.824, P<0.0001). Conclusion: This simple CRSF system, which has a high NPV, can be useful for predicting the risk of mortality in COVID-19 patients. It can also be used as a disease severity indicator to determine triage level for hospitalization. © 2022 Sharifi et al.