Development of a risk score to identify patients at high risk for a severe course of COVID-19

Abstract

Abstract Aim We aimed to develop a risk score to calculate a person’s individual risk for a severe COVID-19 course (POINTED score) to support prioritization of especially vulnerable patients for a (booster) vaccination. Subject and methods This cohort study was based on German claims data and included 623,363 individuals with a COVID-19 diagnosis in 2020. The outcome was COVID-19 related treatment in an intensive care unit, mechanical ventilation, or death after a COVID-19 infection. Data were split into a training and a test sample. Poisson regression models with robust standard errors including 35 predefined risk factors were calculated. Coefficients were rescaled with a min–max normalization to derive numeric score values between 0 and 20 for each risk factor. The scores’ discriminatory ability was evaluated by calculating the area under the curve (AUC). Results Besides age, down syndrome and hematologic cancer with therapy, immunosuppressive therapy, and other neurological conditions were the risk factors with the highest risk for a severe COVID-19 course. The AUC of the POINTED score was 0.889, indicating very good predictive validity. Conclusion The POINTED score is a valid tool to calculate a person’s risk for a severe COVID-19 course.