June 11, 2020

A Novel Approach to Monitoring the COVID-19 Pandemic Using Emergency Department Discharge Diagnoses

Category: Article Summary

Topic: Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions

• [pre-print, not peer reviewed] Duber et al. identified 422 Emergency Department (ED) visits as with COVID-like illness (CLI) in King County, WA between January 1 and May 1, 2020. Compared to confirmed COVID-19 cases and deaths, CLI visits appear to rise and peak well in advance of both confirmed cases and deaths. They concluded that ED-based CLI visits are a temporally leading indicator of the pandemic, and that adopting and scaling up a CLI monitoring at the local level could aid local response efforts. 

Duber et al. (June 11, 2020). A Novel Approach to Monitoring the COVID-19 Pandemic Using Emergency Department Discharge Diagnoses. Pre-print downloaded June 11 from https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.06.09.20126508