COVID-19 severity scale for claims data research.

Objective: To create and validate a methodology to assign a severity level to an episode of COVID-19 for retrospective analysis in claims data.

Data Source: Secondary data obtained by license agreement from Optum provided claims records nationally for 19,761,754 persons, of which, 692,094 persons had COVID-19 in 2020.

Study Design: The World Health Organization (WHO) COVID-19 Progression Scale was used as a model to identify endpoints as measures of episode severity within claims data.

Analysis of COVID-19 Infection and Mortality Among Patients With Psychiatric Disorders, 2020.

Importance: People with major psychiatric disorders are more likely to have comorbidities associated with worse outcomes of COVID-19. This fact alone could determine greater vulnerability of people with major psychiatric disorders to COVID-19.

Objective: To assess the odds of testing positive for and mortality from COVID-19 among and between patients with schizophrenia, mood disorders, anxiety disorders and a reference group in a large national database.