MATERIALS AND METHOD
Approval for the study was received from the Medical Specialty Education Board (decision no: 711/2021). We included 350 adult patients aged 18–65 years who’s COVID-19 infection had been confirmed by RT-PCR positivity between August 2020 and January 2021 in our hospital’s COVID-19 outpatient clinic and COVID-19 service. The patients’ admission symptoms, clinical features, laboratory parameters, lung radiological imaging and treatment regimens were retrospectively obtained from the hospital information system. Patients (n = 79) who did not have a thorax CT examination and were asymptomatic or had symptoms for less than 5 days were excluded from the study. According to the thorax CT images, the patients were divided into two groups, those who developed and those who did not develop pneumonia, and their clinical features, treatment protocols and laboratory parameters; that is, D-dimer, troponin, C-reactive protein (CRP), albumin, ferritin, lymphocyte count and percentage, neutrophil count and percentage, neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio (NLR), aspartate aminotransferase (AST), alanine aminotransferase (ALT), and lactate dehydrogenase (LDH), were recorded retrospectively. The patients’ informed consent was obtained.