TY - JOUR T1 - Correspondence on ‘Prospective predictive performance comparison between clinical gestalt and validated COVID-19 mortality scores’ by Soto-Mota <em>et al</em> JF - Journal of Investigative Medicine JO - J Investig Med SP - 972 LP - 974 DO - 10.1136/jim-2021-002243 VL - 70 IS - 4 AU - Héctor David Meza-Comparán Y1 - 2022/04/01 UR - http://hw-f5-jim.highwire.org/content/70/4/972.abstract N2 - Dear Editor,I read the article ‘Prospective predictive performance comparison between clinical gestalt and validated COVID-19 mortality scores’ with great interest.1 The authors compared various COVID-19 mortality prediction models validated in Mexican patients — LOW-HARM, MSL-COVID-19, Nutri-CoV, and neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio (NLR) —, qSOFA, and NEWS2 against clinical gestalt to predict mortality among COVID-19 patients admitted to a tertiary hospital, concluding that clinical gestalt was non-inferior. I would like to comment on some issues with this article.It is unclear what “clinical gestalt” meant in the study since no formal definition was provided by the authors other than study procedures. Others have defined clinical gestalt as “a physician’s unstructured estimate”2 or an “overall clinical impression”.3 Additionally, it is not clear how the authors selected the prediction models to be evaluated. They mentioned that three models validated in datasets including Mexican patients were included; however, in the absence of clear inclusion criteria, other models validated in Mexican patients could have … ER -