Abstract
The new coronavirus (2019-nCoV) has caused the death of more than 1.68 million patients worldwide, including 6,909 deaths registered in Morocco until 12/20/2020. The main objective of this study is to investigate epidemiological, clinical, and paraclinical factors predicting progression to the severity in order to identify patients at risk and adopt strategies for individualized management.
We conduct this observational, descriptive, and analytical study from 01/09/2020 to 25/12/2020, at AL FARABI regional hospital in Oujda. 567 patients were eligible for our study out of 2000 patients who were admitted since our first case on April 2020. Our sample was divided into two groups based on pulse oxygen saturation on admission. We identified 294 as a Severe/Critical case and 273 as a Mild/Moderate form on admission. The mean age was significantly higher in the severe group (63.28 ± 12.4 vs 55.13 ± 17.2). The sex ratio M/F was 0.87. Compared with non-severe cases, severe cases exhibited more comorbidities, including diabetes (60.4% vs 39.6%; P 0.003), and hypertension (63.6% vs 26.4%; P 0.002). Several biological parameters were associated with disease severity in univariate analysis, the most important being lymphopenia, elevated C-reactive protein, and ferritin levels. lymphopenia (OR 3.76; 95% CI, 4.25-9.23), elevated C-reactive protein (OR, 5.7; 95% CI, 3.84-8.48) ferritin levels (OR, 3.6; 95% CI, 1.64-7.89) were significantly associated with severe cases of COVID-19. Mortality is 2.9% for all of our patients; it increases to 4.5% if we consider severe cases only. Identification and evaluation of epidemiological, clinical, and paraclinical parameters are important to identify patients at high risk of SARS-COV2 severity to guide treatment.
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