Importance: COVID-19 has caused a worldwide illness and New York became the epicenter of COVID-19 in the United States from Mid-March to May 2020.
Objective: To investigate the coagulopathic presentation of COVID and its natural course during the early stages of the COVID-19 surge in New York. To investigate whether hematologic and coagulation parameters can be used to assess illness severity and death.
Design: Retrospective case study of positive COVID inpatients between March 20, 2020-March 31, 2020.
Setting: Montefiore Health System main hospital, Moses, a large tertiary care center in the Bronx.
Participants: Adult inpatients with positive COVID tests hospitalized at MHS.
Exposure for observational studies: Datasets of participants were queried for demographic (age, sex, socioeconomic status, and self-reported race and/or ethnicity), clinical and laboratory data.
Main outcome and measures: Relationship and predictive value of measured parameters to mortality and illness severity.
Results: Of the 225 in this case review, 75 died during hospitalization while 150 were discharged home. Only the admission PT, absolute neutrophil count (ANC) and first D-Dimer could significantly differentiate those who were discharged alive and those who died. Logistic regression analysis shows increased odds ratio for mortality by first D-Dimer within 48 hrs. of admission. The optimal cut-point for the initial D-Dimer to predict mortality was found to be 2.1 μg/mL. 15% of discharged patients required readmission and more than a third of readmitted patients died (5% of all initially discharged).
Conclusion: We describe here a comprehensive assessment of hematologic and coagulation parameters in COVID-19 and examine the relationship of these to mortality. We demonstrate that both initial and maximum D-Dimer values are biomarkers that can be used for survival assessments. Furthermore, D-Dimer may be useful to follow up discharged patients.
Keywords: COVID-19; D-Dimer; New York City; coagulopathy; prothrombin time.
Copyright © 2021 Reyes Gil, Gonzalez-Lugo, Rahman, Barouqa, Szymanski, Ikemura, Lo and Billett.