Comparative LUSZ Therapeutic Study (LUSZ_AVIST) of Antiviral, Antiretroviral, and Immunosuppressive Treatments in Hospitalized COVID-19 Patients with High-Risk Factors, Biomarkers, and Disease Progression.

COVID-19 has spread rapidly and caused a global pandemic making it one of the deadliest in history. Early identification of patients with coronavirus disease 2019 who may develop critical illness is of immense importance. Therefore, novel biomarkers were needed to identify patients who will suffer rapid disease progression to severe complications and death. Many treatments were adopted including the antiviral Remdesivir, the antiretroviral Lopinavir /Ritonavir and Tocilizumab. Our study aimed not only to specify high-risk factors and biomarkers of fatal outcome in hospitalized subjects with coronavirus but also to compare the efficacy of the three considered treatments to help clinicians better choose a therapeutic strategy and reduce mortality. We divided the population (n=711) into four main groups based according to the WHO ordinal severity scale. The percentage of mortality, in and out the hospital, the length of stay in the hospital, the pulmonary inflammatory lesion and its distribution, the SARS-CoV-2 IgM and IgG variations at admission, the inflammatory markers, the complete blood count, the coagulation factors and enzymes, proteins and electrolytes profile, glucose and lipid profile, and other relevant markers were measured. The significance of the observed variation was assessed by multivariate and ANOVA analyses. We succeeded to establish a novel predictive scoring model of disease progression based on a cohort of Lebanese hospitalized patients relying on the pulmonary inflammatory lesions, inflammation biomarkers such as LDH, D-Dimer, CRP, IL-6 and the lymphocyte count, the number of comorbidities and the age of the patient which all were significantly correlated with the illness severity showing best outcomes with immunomodulatory and anticoagulant treatments by the results. As top tier, Tocilizumab was more efficient than the two other treatments in non-severe cases but none of the used treatments was insanely effective alone to reduce mortality in severe cases.