Prognostic Factors in Patients Admitted to an Urban Teaching Hospital With COVID-19 Infection

As of 27th May 2020, approximately 5.7 million people worldwide are known to have been infected with COVID-19 coronavirus and more than 350,000 have died (1). The severity of this viral disease for an individual is associated with a widespread perturbation of immune, physiological and metabolic parameters (2, 3). These whole body changes could be considered characteristic of a systemic inflammatory response to tissue injury and it has been long recognised that a large and ongoing systemic inflammatory response is associated with the development of multiple organ failure and infective disease (4, 5).

One of the cardinal signs of severe COVID-19 infection is a marked systemic inflammatory response (2). This response bears striking similarity to the systemic inflammatory response experienced by patients undergoing major elective surgical resections for cancer (6, 7). Indeed, the systemic inflammatory response and the associated metabolic stress has been most well characterised in major elective surgery, where the relationship between the magnitude of the post-operative systemic inflammatory response and the development of post-operative complications is now well recognised, as is the effect of patient comorbidity on this relationship (8, 9). Such work has informed therapeutic manoeuvres including minimally invasive surgery, pre-operative optimisation (e.g. anaesthesia, nutrition and steroids) and enhanced recovery protocols.

The aim of the present study was to examine whether routinely collected clinicopathological characteristics of patients with COVID-19 on admission were informative on the immune and metabolic stress experienced by patients with COVID-19 and whether such characteristics were informative on subsequent outcome.