Clinical features of severe patients infected with 2019 novel coronavirus: a systematic review and meta-analysis

2019 novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has posed significant threats to public health. To identify and treat the severe and critical patients with COVID-19 is the key clinical problem to be solved. The present study aimed to evaluate the clinical characteristics of severe and non-severe patients with COVID-19. We searched independently studies and retrieved the data that involved the clinical characteristics of severe and non-severe patients with COVID-19 through database searching. Two authors independently retrieved the data from the individual studies, assessed the study quality with Newcastle-Ottawa Scale and analyzed publication bias by Begg's test. We calculated the odds ratio (OR) of groups using fixed or random-effect models. Five studies with 5,328 patients confirmed with COVID-19 met the inclusion criteria. Severe patents were older and more common in dyspnea, vomiting or diarrhea, creatinine >104 µmol/L, procalcitonin ≥0.05 ng/mL, lymphocyte count