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We looked at all the various CDC
criteria, and things that might be related to severity of illness, such as fever, white
blood cell count, vomiting, etc., and what we found was none of them was terribly
predictive. What was very predictive of whether you ended up in the hospital or not was
where you first presented – where you physically showed up. So if you showed up at an
out-of-hospital clinic, where you would then have to take a taxi across town to get to the
hospital, your rate of hospitalization was 3.5%. On the other hand, if you ended up at a
hospital-based clinic or an emergency department that was physically attached to a
hospital, you had about a seven-fold higher rate of hospitalization. |