• Wui Mei Chew, Chee Hong Loh, Aditi Jalali, En FongGrace ShiGSDepartment of General Medicine, Changi General Hospital, Singapore., KumarLoshini SenthilLSDepartment of General Medicine, Changi General Hospital, Singapore., Zhen SimRachel HuiRHDepartment of General Medicine, Changi General Hospital, Singapore., Russell Pinxue Tan, Sunil Ravinder Gill, Trilene Ruiting Liang, Kwang KohJansen MengJMDepartment of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, Changi General Hospital, Singapore., and Tunn Ren Tay.
• Department of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, Changi General Hospital, Singapore.
• Singap Med J. 2022 Aug 1; 63 (8): 426432426-432.

IntroductionSingapore's enhanced surveillance programme for COVID-19 identifies and isolates hospitalised patients with acute respiratory symptoms to prevent nosocomial spread. We developed risk prediction models to identify patients with low risk for COVID-19 from this cohort of hospitalised patients with acute respiratory symptoms.MethodsThis was a single-centre retrospective observational study. Patients admitted to our institution's respiratory surveillance wards from 10 February to 30 April 2020 contributed data for analysis. Prediction models for COVID-19 were derived from a training cohort using variables based on demographics, clinical symptoms, exposure risks and blood investigations fitted into logistic regression models. The derived prediction models were subsequently validated on a test cohort.ResultsOf the 1,228 patients analysed, 52 (4.2%) were diagnosed with COVID-19. Two prediction models were derived, the first based on age, presence of sore throat, dormitory residence, blood haemoglobin level (Hb), and total white blood cell counts (TW), and the second based on presence of headache, contact with infective patients, Hb and TW. Both models had good diagnostic performance with areas under the receiver operating characteristic curve of 0.934 and 0.866, respectively. Risk score cut-offs of 0.6 for Model 1 and 0.2 for Model 2 had 100% sensitivity, allowing identification of patients with low risk for COVID-19. Limiting COVID-19 screening to only elevated-risk patients reduced the number of isolation days for surveillance patients by up to 41.7% and COVID-19 swab testing by up to 41.0%.ConclusionPrediction models derived from our study were able to identify patients at low risk for COVID-19 and rationalise resource utilisation.

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