LAUSR

Background:The COVID-19 pandemic affected millions of people with patients presenting with a constellation of symp- toms and comorbidities. We aimed to estimate the extent of symptoms, comorbidities, other risk factors and outcome of COVID-19 cases presenting at our facility. Methods:Clinical and laboratory data was collected, including age, sex, comorbidities, tests performed for confirmation and outcome of 432 positive patients presenting to our tertiary care center from 1st July to 15th October 2020. This was an observational study. Patient outcomes were recorded as death, discharge and lost-to-follow up. Results:The most common age group of confirmed positives was 51-60 years, with 66% males. 78% presented with clini- cal symptoms, the most frequent being fever followed by cough. 82% of confirmed positive was detected by Trunat RT PCR, 3% by Rapid Antigen test and 15% by both these tests. The clinical outcome was: Discharged -73%, Death-6% and lost-to-follow-up -21%. However COVID19 was the cause of death in 1.1%. Among the discharged patients 53% had comorbidities with Diabetes (34.1%) being the commonest. Comorbidities were present in 82.1% deceased patients, of which hypertension (42.8%) was most predominant. All the deceased patients presented with clinical symptoms of which breathlessness (53.5%) was most common. Conclusions:In this single-center study of 432 patients with confirmed COVID-19, the characteristic findings included higher incidence in males, high proportion of symptomatic patients and association of comorbidities (hypertension and diabetes) with adverse outcome. We also found that Trunat RT PCR is far more reliable than Rapid Antigen test for COVID diagnosis.