Prognostic factors for severity and mortality in patients infected with COVID-19: A living systematic review protocol

Ariel Izcovich; Martín Ragusa; Verónica Sanguine; Fernando Tortosa; Federico Espinosa; Camila Agnoletti; María Andrea Lavena Marzio; Agustín Bengolea; Ezequiel Saavedra; Hugo Norberto Catalano; Gabriel Rada

We will present the results of the included studies including the individual prognostic factors in both tabular and narrative formats. We will standardize the units of measurement for each prognostic factor, unifying the direction of the predictors and adjusting the weights of the studies, and calculate crude effect estimates when not provided [22] . When possible, we will meta-analyze all prognostic factors that are both associated with the outcomes mortality and severe COVID-19 infection and reported by more than one study. We will use the generic inverse variance-based method to produce an overall measure of association. We will explore consistency of the associations between our meta-analyzed results and studies reporting the same predictors that could not be pooled. We will use random-effect models provided by the metafor package for R software [23] .