Paper Information

Four health centers from Virginia Commonwealth University, Georgetown University, the University of Florida, and the University of California, Los Angeles.

Coronavirus Disease 2019-confirmed and hospitalized adult patients.

, the second step used blood urea nitrogen, absolute neutrophil count, C-reactive protein, platelet count, and neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio as predictors. C-statistics reflected very good discrimination with internal validation at VCU (0.83, 95% CI 0.79-0.88) and external validation at the other three health systems (range, 0.79-0.85). A one-step model was also derived for comparison. Overall, the two-step risk score had better performance than the one-step score.

Multicenter retrospective observational cohort study.

An accurate prognostic score to predict mortality for adults with COVID-19 infection is needed to understand who would benefit most from hospitalizations and more intensive support and care. We aimed to develop and validate a two-step score system for patient triage, and to identify patients at a relatively low level of mortality risk using easy-to-collect individual information.

The two-step scoring system used widely available, point-of-care data for triage of COVID-19 patients and is a potentially time- and cost-saving tool in practice.