Characteristics of patients with Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) and seasonal influenza at time of hospital admission: a single center comparative study.

Discriminating COVID-19 from influenza patients based on clinical presentation is challenging. Time from symptom onset to hospital admission is considerably longer in COVID-19 than in influenza patients and showed the strongest discriminatory power in our classification tree. Although they had fewer comorbidities, in-hospital mortality was higher for COVID-19 patients.