• Amir Sadeghi, Pegah Eslami, Arash Dooghaie Moghadam, Bobak Moazzami, Ali Pirsalehi, Saba Ilkhani, Sepideh Banar, Fateme Feizollahi, Mohammad Vahidi, Saeed Abdi, Hamid Asadzadeh Aghdaei, Mohammad Reza Zali, and Maryam Nasserinejad.
• Gastroenterology and Liver Diseases Research Center, Research Institute for Gastroenterology and Liver Diseases, Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran.
• Arch Iran Med. 2021 Apr 1; 24 (4): 333-338.

BackgroundDecision-making on allocating scarce medical resources is crucial in the context of a strong health system reaction to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Therefore, understanding the risk factors related to a high mortality rate can enable the physicians for a better decision-making process.MethodsInformation was collected regarding clinical, demographic, and epidemiological features of the definite COVID-19 cases. Through Cox regression and statistical analysis, the risk factors related to mortality were determined. The Kaplan-Meier curve was used to estimate survival function and measure the mean length of living time in the patients.ResultsAmong about 3000 patients admitted in the Taleghani hospital as outpatients with suspicious signs and symptoms of COVID-19 in 2 months, 214 people were confirmed positive for this virus using the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) technique. Median time to death was 30 days. In this population, 24.29% of the patients died and 24.76% of them were admitted to the ICU (intensive care unit) during hospitalization. The results of Multivariate Cox regression Analysis showed that factors including age (HR, 1.031; 95% CI, 1.001-1.062; P value=0.04), and C-reactive protein (CRP) (HR, 1.007; 95% CI, 1.000-1.015; P value=0.04) could independently predict mortality. Furthermore, the results showed that age above 59 years directly increased mortality rate and decreased survival among our study population.ConclusionPredictor factors play an important role in decisions on public health policy-making. Our findings suggested that advanced age and CRP were independent mortality rate predictors in the admitted patients.© 2021 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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