Introduction: COVID-19 emerged as a new disease during the early period of 2020. Given that our institution is a cardiac specialty center and our patients have numerous co-morbidities compared to the general population, we wanted to determine the clinical profiles and in-hospital short-term outcomes of suspect, probable and confirmed adult COVID-19 patients seen at our institution. Methodology: We prospectively enrolled 323 adult (115 health care workers) suspect, probable and confirmed COVID- 19 patients admitted from March to June 2020. We described and analyzed their clinical presentation, and in-hospital outcomes. Results: There were 117 (36.22%) RT-PCR positive patients with 36.53% confirmed, 13.00% probable and 50.46% suspect patients. For probable and confirmed patients, 25%, 21.25%, 23.13% 16.25% had no, mild, moderate, and severe symptoms, respectively with 14.28% critical cases. Over-all mortality rate for probable and confirmed cases was 25.54% with 91.3% mortality rate for critical cases. Co-morbidities with statistically significant association with severity of disease were as follows: hypertension, heart disease, cerebrovascular disease, diabetes mellitus and COPD. Conclusion During the early period of the COVID-19 pandemic, only 36.53% of cases admitted at our institution were COVID-19 confirmed by RT-PCR. One-third of the cases were severe and critical, with more clinical instability, increased inflammatory markers, and higher in-hospital morbidity and mortality.
COVID-19 ; Pandemics ; Philippines