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.