The clinical specialists at Werfen are currently following scientific papers related to COVID-19 and it consequences on health and take in care. Open-access papers that might interest you will be gathered in different news items on our website and can also be downloaded from the journals websites. 

Zhou F, Yu T, Du R, et al. Clinical course and risk factors for mortality of adult inpatients with COVID-19 in Wuhan, China: a retrospective cohort study. The Lancet 2020 doi: 10.1016/s0140-6736(20)30566-3

This paper is retrospective, multicentre cohort study aiming to explore risk factors of in-hospital death for patients and describe the clinical course of symptoms, viral shedding, and temporal changes of laboratory findings during hospitalisation. This study included all adult inpatients (≥18 years old) with laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 from Jinyintan Hospital and Wuhan Pulmonary Hospital (Wuhan, China) who had been discharged or had died by Jan 31, 2020. Demographic, clinical, treatment, and laboratory data, including serial samples for viral RNA detection, were extracted from electronic medical records and compared between survivors and non-survivors.  The author’s interpretation is that the potential risk factors of older age, high SOFA score, and d-dimer greater than 1 µg/mL could help clinicians to identify patients with poor prognosis at an early stage. Prolonged viral shedding provides the rationale for a strategy of isolation of infected patients and optimal antiviral interventions in the future.