Concept
With a simple approach, we give a preliminary assessment of individual seriousness of COVID-19 using well-described case series of hospitalised COVID-19 pneumonia patients from the cities of Wuhan, Beijing, Shenzhen and the provinces of Hubei and Zhejiang [5-12]. We defined a reference group from a well-known setting: in 73 German sentinel hospitals, we extracted the data of all inpatients diagnosed with pneumonia (International Classification of Diseases, 10th revision codes J12-J18, primary diagnosis [13]) that were admitted during three consecutive weeks, after the start and before the peak of the influenza epidemic in the years 2015 to 2019. We compared severity parameters that were described for COVID-19 patients (acute respiratory distress syndrome, ventilation, intensive care, case fatality) with those from the German sentinel system. Furthermore, we stratified parameters by potential risk groups such as age, sex and chronic comorbidities. We also compared outcomes and risk factors for critically ill patients (i.e. received intensive care and ventilation) [14]. As the Chinese population is younger, with a larger proportion of males compared with the German population, we applied weights and provided crude and adjusted proportions for the sentinel pneumonia patients (SPP) [15]. This approach, which can be used by other countries using syndromic surveillance, attempts to replicate the uncertainty of initial results for the new coronavirus.