A critical challenge during the early COVID-19 pandemic was determining whether a patient would survive the infection or die from it. And even though a host of lifesaving therapeutics now spares substantially more lives than four years ago, the art of predicting COVID outcomes remains a matter of scientific pursuit. Data from an international team of researchers in Scotland and Brazil suggest that their prediction model defines specific characteristics of SARS-CoV-2 infection that can be used to forecast disease outcomes and triage sick patients in hospitals.
The data in the new study are based on infections that occurred in 2020, and team members contend that their forecasting method is useful. But they worry that in 2024, patients' protection against COVID via vaccines could raise questions whether their method is a timely model. The study is published in the journal Science Translational Medicine .
Medical interventions that range from vaccines and antivirals to monoclonal antibodies have dramatically curtailed fatalities from COVID compared with the early years of the pandemic. Yet, the novel strategy, based on research involving patients in Brazil, reveals specific "signatures" of COVID infection, which allowed the team to forecast patients' outcomes with a fair degree of accuracy. João Da Silva Filho of the Wellcome Center for Integrative Parasitology and the School of Infection and Immunity at University of Glasgow in Scotland has characterized and defined these sign.