<span style="mso-fareast-font-family: 'Palatino Linotype';">Assessing Severity in Patients with COVID-19 Using Chest Computed Tomography: A Retrospective Study of Patients from a University Hospital in Southeastern Brazil

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) was first described in Wuhan, China, in late 2019 and declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO) in March 2020. The present study aimed to characterize the clinical and chest computed tomography (CT) findings in a sample of patients with COVID-19 and to correlate them with the outcome of death. The specific objectives were to characterize the sample epidemiologically and to describe the tomographic patterns found. This retrospective, observational, and cross-sectional study analyzed associations between chest CT findings and outcomes in COVID-19 patients from a university hospital in southeastern Brazil, from April 2020 to June 2021. The most frequent symptoms included cough, dyspnea, fever, myalgia, chest pain, anosmia, and odynophagia. Common CT findings, in descending order, were ground-glass opacities, consolidations, mosaic paving, parenchymal bands, peribronchovascular consolidations, bronchial ectasia, subpleural lines, nodules with ground-glass halos, architectural distortion, and ground-glass bands. Patients with age &ge;60 years and comorbidities were significant risk factors for mortality. Patients with &gt;50% parenchymal involvement and indeterminate/atypical CT patterns also had a higher risk of death. While serological tests remain critical for diagnosis, this study highlights the importance of imaging in guiding treatment protocols, especially given the delays in test results.