COVID-19Research Paper|Volume 12, Issue 15|pp 15730—15740

Risk factors for severe cases of COVID-19: a retrospective cohort study

Feng He¹, Qingqing Luo¹, Ming Lei², Lixin Fan², Xinning Shao², Guanglie Huang¹, Jun Zeng¹, Ziwen Zhao¹, Shuguang Qin¹, Zhi Yang¹, Na Yu¹, Liuping Yang², Jie Cao¹

¹Guangzhou First People’s Hospital, The Second Affiliated Hospital of South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, China
²Guangzhou Eighth People’s Hospital, Guangzhou Medical University, Guangzhou, China

* Equal contribution

Received: April 18, 2020Accepted: July 9, 2020Published: August 15, 2020

https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.103803

Copyright © 2020 He et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Abstract

Background: SARS-CoV-2 has raged around the world since March, 2020. We aim to describe the clinical characteristics and risk factors of severe patients with COVID-19 in Guangzhou.

Results: The severity and mortality of COVID-19 was 10.4% and 0.3% respectively. And each 1-year increase in age (OR, 1.057; 95% CI, 1.018-1.098; P=0.004), Wuhan exposure history greater than 2 weeks (OR, 2.765; 95% CI, 1.040-7.355; P=0.042), diarrhea (OR, 24.349; 95% CI, 3.580-165.609; P=0.001), chronic kidney disease (OR, 6.966; 95% CI, 1.310-37.058; P = 0.023), myoglobin higher than 106 μg/L (OR, 8.910; 95% CI, 1.225-64.816; P=0.031), white blood cell higher than 10×10⁹/L (OR, 5.776; 95% CI, 1.052-31.722; P=0.044), and C-reactive protein higher than 10 mg/L (OR, 5.362; 95% CI, 1.631-17.626; P=0.006) were risk factors for severe cases.

Conclusion: Older age, Wuhan exposure history, diarrhea, chronic kidney disease, elevated myoglobin, elevated white blood cell and C-reactive protein were independent risk factors for severe patients with COVID-19 in Guangzhou.

Methods: We included 288 adult patients with COVID-19 and compared the data between severe and non-severe group. We used univariate and multivariate logistic regression methods to explore risk factors of severe cases.