Epidemiological, Clinical Characteristics and Risk Factors for Severe Condition and ICU Admission of COVID-19 Patients of Early Stage in China: A review

  1. Qinwei Fu
  2. Wenjuan Wu
  3. Yang Liu
  4. Heyin Huang
  5. Peihai Zhang
  6. Xinrong Li
  7. Ying Liu
  8. Lanzhi Zhang
  9. Hui Yang
  10. Xin Zhang
  11. Qinxiu Zhang
  12. Chaolin Huang

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Abstract

Objective

Some retrospective studies reporting epidemiological, clinical characteristics of COVID-19 patients of early stage were published. We aim to provide an overview of epidemiological and clinical characteristics of the COVID-19 patients, and identification, treatment of early stage, especially for the patients with poor prognosis.

Data Sources

PubMed, CNKI and Google Scholar.

Study Selection

We searched for published retrospective studies that described epidemiological and clinical characteristics of confirmed COVID-19 patients in China by April 14 th , 2020 with search terms. Some studies were excluded according to criteria. Finally, 53 studies were included.

Data Extraction

Characteristics of the COVID-19 patients available from included articles were extracted, reorganized and recorded into electronic data forms.

Data Synthesis

Characteristics of patients in the included studies were summarized and analyzed for median-interquartile ranges and univariable odds ratio.

Conclusion

This study summarized, analyzed and compared epidemiological, clinical characteristics and estimated univariable risk factors among confirmed COVID-19 patients either in former epicenter, in severe condition, with ICU admission or not of early stage. Higher proportions of patients were found to have older age and more comorbidities, typical characteristics on admission and complications either in former epicenter, with severe condition or ICU admission. No evidence showed that patients who were male or had smoking history had higher susceptibility, but they were significant risk factors for severe condition. Some self-implementable traditional Chinese medicine therapies conducted for immunity improvement, control of comorbidities and reduction of some medicine intake. Limited evidence revealed that some characteristics of the disease might be changing with human-to-human transmission, and more research, especially international collaboration, is needed.

Copyright form disclosure

The authors have disclosed that they do not have any potential conflicts of interest.

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  1. ScreenIT

    SciScore for 10.1101/2021.02.15.21249676: (What is this?)

    Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

    Table 1: Rigor

    Institutional Review Board Statementnot detected.
    Randomizationnot detected.
    Blindingnot detected.
    Power Analysisnot detected.
    Sex as a biological variablenot detected.

    Table 2: Resources

    Software and Algorithms
    SentencesResources
    earch strategy and selection criteria: We searched PubMed, CNKI and Google Scholar for published retrospective studies that described epidemiological and clinical characteristics of confirmed COVID-19 patients in China by April 14th, 2020.
    PubMed
    suggested: (PubMed, RRID:SCR_004846)
    Google Scholar
    suggested: (Google Scholar, RRID:SCR_008878)
    Statistical analyses were performed by SPSS Version 25.0 Software, and P value <0.05 was considered statistically significant with all tests 2-sided.
    SPSS
    suggested: (SPSS, RRID:SCR_002865)

    Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).

    Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:
    Our study had several limitations. Firstly, there might be some repetition among data of patients from the 53 researches included in our study because of the overlap in range of time and location, and a table of some detailed information of the included studies are in table S2. Secondly is the relatively small number of researches included in our study for risk factor analysis among patients with/without ICU admission, so more researches are needed on epidemiological and clinical characteristics of COVID-19 patients with different ICU admission groups. Finally, results of our study are based on published researches, while many issues of SARS-Cov-2 are still uncertain, so there may exist bias in our study which justifies a modest interpretation of our results.

    Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.

    Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.

    Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.

    Results from rtransparent:
    • Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • No protocol registration statement was detected.

    About SciScore

    SciScore is an automated tool that is designed to assist expert reviewers by finding and presenting formulaic information scattered throughout a paper in a standard, easy to digest format. SciScore checks for the presence and correctness of RRIDs (research resource identifiers), and for rigor criteria such as sex and investigator blinding. For details on the theoretical underpinning of rigor criteria and the tools shown here, including references cited, please follow this link.

  2. Version published to 10.1101/2021.02.15.21249676v1 on medRxiv