Abstract

Background: During the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, earlywarning scores (EWS) have been used to help emergency physicians with triage. This study aimed to evaluate the three most used EWSs: Rapid Emergency Medicine Score (REMS), Modified Early Warning Score (MEWS), and National Early Warning Score (NEWS), based on the in-hospital mortality of geriatric patients with COVID-19.

Methods: This retrospective, single-center study included geriatric patients hospitalized for COVID-19 from May 2021 to July 2021 at the MacKay Memorial Hospital. Patients who (i) presented with out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA), (ii) were transferred from other hospitals, and (iii) had missing demographic data were excluded. The area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) was calculated to predict the in-hospital mortality rate associated with each EWS.

Results: The study included 135 patients, of whom 24 (17.8%) died. The median age of the included patients was 74.44 years, and 53% of them were men. Of the selected EWSs, MEWS (AUC = 0.761) exhibited the highest prognostic value, with a cutoff value of 3.5. Furthermore, NEWS (AUC = 0.758) and REMS (AUC = 0.736) exhibited good prognostic value.

Conclusion: We validated the three most used EWSs, and MEWS performed well in predicting the inhospital mortality of geriatric patients with COVID-19 using basic parameters.