Introduction
The novel coronavirus SARS-19, which started in December 2019, has spread all over the world from the city of Wuhan, China. It has been recognized as a pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO) since March 11, 2020 (1). The first case that was diagnosed in our country was announced on March 11, 2020 (2). There have been a great number of cases infected with COVID-19 and hospitalized because of the severity of the disease since then. Early detection is essential because thousands of people die from the COVID-19 outbreak. The clinician needs to predict which cases possibly have poor progression because of the fact that patients with a severe course may be mortal. For this reason, epidemiological, demographic, clinical, laboratory, and radiological characteristics were examined in some studies to determine the severity of COVID-19 (3-6).
Advanced age, presence of concomitant cardiovascular and cerebrovascular disease, lactate dehydrogenase (LDH) and D-dimer levels, and CD3 + CD8 + T-cell levels were studied in recent studies as predictors of mortality. However, a simple scoring system is still required to predict mortality. It was reported that the severity of COVID-19 pneumonia is affected by age and comorbidity (3-5). A simple scoring system will be useful to the clinician at the time of patient admission to predict mortality in hospitalized patients infected with COVID-19, by evaluating personal risk factors (i.e. age, gender, smoking, Body Mass Index (BMI), ACE inhibitor use, blood type, and comorbidity) rather than laboratory and radiological findings, which require time and technique. For this reason, the purpose of this study was to determine the personal risk factors associated with mortality in COVID-19 patients who are hospitalized for pneumonia, and also, to find a COVID-19 mortality score based on these.