Abstract
INTRODUCTION: The novel coronavirus (COVID-19) has become a global pandemic with sharp rises in the number of confirmed cases and rapid spread across the world. Here, we looked at the effects of geographic differences on clinical manifestations of SARS-CoV-2 infected patients. METHODS: A total of 114 confirmed COVID-19 patients were included in this study. The epidemiological, demographic, clinical, as well as laboratory findings were extracted from the electronic medical records of these patients. RESULTS: We report the observation that patients from overseas residents diagnosed with COVID-19 were mildly symptomatic with cough and presented with lower inflammatory response and attenuated virus clearance rate, as well as correspondingly prolonged days of hospital stay than local Chinese patients. Moreover, the receiver-operating characteristic (ROC) analysis, performed to provide a measure of the difference between two groups, showed that serum albumin had the highest area under the curve value (0.81, p < 0.001). DISCUSSION: Our results suggested that blood albumin level acted as a predictive value in distinguishing clinical features between local and overseas Chinese. This work underscores the need to identify distinguishably prognostic factors of geographical dissimilarity in COVID-19 patients.