Usefulness of CURB-65, pneumonia severity index and MULBSTA in predicting COVID-19 mortality

The aim of our study is to evaluate the accuracy of CURB-65 and Pneumonia Severity Index (PSI), the most widely used scores for community acquired pneumonia, and MuLBSTA, a viral pneumonia score, in predicting 28-day mortality in Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pneumonia.We retrospectively collected clinical data of consecutive patients with laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 pneumonia admitted at Papa Giovanni XXIII Hospital from February 23rd to March 14th, 2020. We calculated at Emergency Department (ED) presentation CURB-65, PSI and MuLBSTA and we compared their performances in discriminating between survivors and non-survivors at 28 days. Among 431 hospitalized patients, the majority presented with hypoxic respiratory failure: median (interquartile range, IQR) PaO2/FiO2 ratio at admission was 228.6 (142.0-278.1). In the first 24 hours, 111 (27%) patients were administered low-flow oxygen cannula, 50 (12%) Venturi Mask, 95 (23%) non-rebreather mask, 106 (26%) non-invasive ventilation, 12 (3%) mechanical ventilation and 41 (9%) were not administered oxygen therapy. Mortality rate at 28-day was 35% (150/431). Between survivors and non-survivors, median (IQR) scores were, respectively, 1.0 (1.0-2.0) and 2.0 (2.0-3.0) for CURB-65 (p