Prediction of COVID-19 Patients at High Risk of Progression to Severe Disease

In order to develop a novel scoring model for the prediction of coronavirus disease-19 (COVID-19) patients at high risk of severe disease, we retrospectively studied 419 patients from five hospitals in Shanghai, Hubei, and Jiangsu Provinces from January 22 to March 30, 2020. Multivariate Cox regression and orthogonal projections to latent structures discriminant analysis (OPLS-DA) were both used to identify high-risk factors for disease severity in COVID-19 patients. The prediction model was developed based on four high-risk factors. Multivariate analysis showed that comorbidity [hazard ratio (HR) 3.17, 95% confidence interval (CI) 1.96–5.11], albumin (ALB) level (HR 3.67, 95% CI 1.91–7.02), C-reactive protein (CRP) level (HR 3.16, 95% CI 1.68–5.96), and age ≥60 years (HR 2.31, 95% CI 1.43–3.73) were independent risk factors for disease severity in COVID-19 patients. OPLS-DA identified that the top five influencing parameters for COVID-19 severity were CRP, ALB, age ≥60 years, comorbidity, and lactate dehydrogenase (LDH) level. When incorporating the above four factors, the nomogram had a good concordance index of 0.86 (95% CI 0.83–0.89) and had an optimal agreement between the predictive nomogram and the actual observation with a slope of 0.95 (R(2) = 0.89) in the 7-day prediction and 0.96 (R(2) = 0.92) in the 14-day prediction after 1,000 bootstrap sampling. The area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of the COVID-19-American Association for Clinical Chemistry (AACC) model was 0.85 (95% CI 0.81–0.90). According to the probability of severity, the model divided the patients into three groups: low risk, intermediate risk, and high risk. The COVID-19-AACC model is an effective method for clinicians to screen patients at high risk of severe disease.