Risk factors for severe COVID-19: evidence from 167 hospitalized patients in Anhui, China

In the journal, a comprehensive review of COVID-19 was published to summarize the nature of SARS-CoV-2 and the timing of its clinical characteristics. Since the emerging infectious disease emerged in Wuhan, China, it has spread rapidly around the world. According to the latest epidemiological statistics, by March 20, 2020, the number of confirmed cases worldwide has exceeded 240,000, with a fatality rate of 4.1%. The course of COVID-19 illness can progress rapidly, causing acute respiratory distress syndrome, septic shock, metabolic acidosis and blood coagulation dysfunction. Due to a previous lack of in-depth research on the characteristics of the disease, the mortality of severe illness is high. It is very important to analyse the clinical characteristics of COVID-19 in international regions and identify risk factors to reduce the incidence of severe and critical illness in the early stage. In this letter, we present discrepancies of patients with different disease severities and risk factors for severe COVID-19 by comparing and analysing epidemiological and clinical data of 167 confirmed patients in Anhui, China. In the present study, the rate of severely ill patients was as high as 17.9%. Comparisons of demographics and clinical characteristics between 30 severe and 137 non-severe patients are shown in table 1.