We appreciate the opportunity to respond to the comment about the Sequential Organ Failure Assessment (SOFA) score by Dr Ruben Coto. We admit that we misquoted the original SOFA score including six items1 in our paper. But we did not double‐count the thrombopenia for sepsis‐induced coagulopathy (SIC) score2 in practice, it's an obvious repetitive item.
The enrolled patients in our study met the definition of severe COVID‐19 suggested by the National Health Commission of China,3 which reflected respiratory insufficiency based on three parameters. As PaO2/FiO2 ≤ 300 mm Hg is one item of the severe COVID‐19 definition, and respiratory support was given to almost all of the enrolled patients, in fact, most of our patients could get ≥2 points of respiratory SOFA score, meanwhile, some patients also got points on cardiovascular, hepatic, or renal SOFA score. Hence, the results of prothrombin time (international normalized ratio) and platelet count were commonly the determinants of SIC scoring in these patients.
We would like to modify the text about the SOFA score used in the SIC criteria before formal publication of this paper.
CONFLICTS OF INTEREST
None declared.
Footnotes
Received: 07 April 2020
Manuscript handled by: David Lillicrap
Final decision: David Lillicrap, 10 April 2020
REFERENCES
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