Using NEWS2 to triage newly admitted patients with COVID-19

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has spread globally and caused a major worldwide health crisis. Patients who are affected more seriously by COVID-19 usually deteriorate rapidly and need further intensive care.

We aimed to assess the performance of the National Early Warning Score 2 (NEWS2) as a risk stratification tool to discriminate newly admitted patients with COVID-19 at risk of serious events.

We conducted a retrospective single-centre case-control study on 200 unselected patients consecutively admitted in March 2020 in a public general hospital in Wuhan, China.

The following serious events were considered: mortality, unplanned intensive care unit (ICU) admission, and non-invasive ventilation treatment. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis and logistic regression analysis were used to quantify the association between outcomes and NEWS2.

There were 12 patients (6.0%) who had serious events, where 7 patients (3.5%) experienced unplanned ICU admissions. The area under the ROC curve (AUROC) and cut-off of NEWS2 for the composite outcome were 0.83 and 3, respectively. For patients with NEWS2 ≥ 4, the odds of being at risk for serious events was 16.4 (AUROC = 0.74), while for patients with NEWS2 ≥ 7, the odds of being at risk for serious events was 18.2 (AUROC = 0.71).

NEWS2 has an appropriate ability to triage newly admitted patients with COVID-19 into three levels of risk: low risk (NEWS2 = 0-3), medium risk (NEWS2 = 4-6), and high risk (NEWS2 ≥ 7).

Using NEWS2 may help nurses in early identification of at-risk COVID-19 patients and clinical nursing decision-making. Using NEWS2 to triage new patients with COVID-19 may help nurses provide more appropriate level of care and medical resources allocation for patients safety.