Patients’ admission details and baseline clinical data
The mean admission body temp erature of all patients was 37.7℃, while their mean initial respiratory rate was 26.6 breaths per minute, and the mean initial heart rate was 98.6±19.3 beats per minute. The mean Visual Triage score was 6.7±1.9 and the mean Glasgow Coma Scale was 10.2±5.6. For the Hospital B the mean Visual Triage score was 6.3±2.5, while the mean Glasgow Coma Scale was 10.8±5.4. For those patients with available data: 76% of the patients were registered as an emergency, 17% were directly admitted to the ICU, and 7% were registered from the outpatient department. In the same context, the admission source was variable among the included patients; 30.3% of the patients were admitted from the emergency room, 26% were referred from another hospital, 22% were admitted from the clinic, and 21.1% were in the hospital ward. Most of the patients (76%) did not sign a “Do not resuscitate” form, while only 24% did sign it. Nevertheless, there was statistically significant difference between Hospital B and Hospital A in terms of initial body temperature (P- value= 0.001), initial heart rate (P- value= 0.002), and registry type (P -value< 0001) (Table 2) .
On admission, 79% of the included patients presented with fever, 76% with shortness of breath, 10% with a sore throat, and 75% with a cough. Regarding the cough type at presentation, 16% of the included patients presented with productive cough, and 15% presented with non-productive cough, while the remaining portion either did not have a cough or did not have a documented cough type. We did not find any statistically significant differences regarding fever (P- value= 1.000), shortness of breath (P- value= 1.000), sore throat (P- value= 0.711), cough (P- value= 0.791), or type of cough among the included patients (P- value= 0.250) among the included patients (Table 3) .