POLIS: a rapid and replicable screening tool to improve risk stratification of potential false-negative COVID-19 patients.

The SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) pandemic at the time of this writing has infected 233, 151 people in the UK with 33 614 deaths.1 Current UK guidance for COVID-19 virus testing states that the preferred screening/testing technique is molecular diagnosis using a real-time RT-PCR (RdRp gene) assay.2 Initial COVID-19 testing likely underestimates the number of actual COVID-19 cases in hospitals as false-negative rates have been to found to be between 10% and 30%.3 4 This could potentially impact on clinical decisions such as ward designation, for example, isolation rooms, COVID-19 wards, use of appropriate personal protective equipment (PPE)5 as well as workforce allocation. There is, therefore, a need to develop a tool using readily available information in the acute setting to risk stratify suspected COVID-19 patients. A literature search was undertaken using keywords such as symptoms, presentation, investigations and COVID-19 in PubMed to recognise clinical factors that are important in identifying COVID-19 in patients. We did not identify any similar tools that were available in the current available literature. Using evidence from current literature, clinical factors and considering the clinical information available to the frontline medical staff at our hospital, a simple tool …