Objectives
COVID-19 is a worrisome, rapidly emerging pandemic with outbreak situations throughout the world. The emergency departments are now flooded with many SARS-CoV-2-infected patients, who present themselves with diverse degrees of disease severity. The appropriate treatment strategy varies between ambulatory self-care and high-tech intensive medicine. Data on disease progression, baseline prognostic factors and critical course are scarce. Furthermore, the impact of diagnostic and therapeutic approaches in emergency care remains unknown. In contrast to other working projects, the Registry for COVID-19 in the Emergency Room (ReCovER) focuses on outcome-relevant effects of emergency medical procedures, including diagnostics and therapeutics and designed to decipher baseline prognostic factors that are essential to decision-making processes in the emergency department. To this end, discharged patients are usually re-contacted to communicate virology test results as well as to re-evaluate the medical condition and the clinical course (e.g. need for re-admission or presentation to outpatient infectious disease specialists). This provides the unique opportunity for emergency care specialists to follow-up and study the different patient cohorts with COVID-19.

In addition, most EDs run separate units for patients that are suspected to suffer from COVID-19. However, only a limited proportion of these patients are finally diagnosed with the disease. The remaining patients can also be documented and serve then as control group.

Methods
We have worked hard to make your work as easy as possible:

• no informed consent necessary due to anonymous reporting
• retrospective documentation
• easy and fast registration for EDs as study center
• modular electronic case report form (eCRF) facilitating easy and rapid data entry
• Click here for our English and German Manual for the documentation of cases in ReCovER

What you have to do to participate

1. Please email us your name and affiliation and we will setup your account to access the COVID-EM.org questionnaire within 24 hours
2. Go to the Registry for COVID-19 in Emergency Medicine data entry tab to access the eCRF.
3. Cases (with and without proven laboratory evidence of SARS-CoV-2) must be entered retrospectively after death or discharge. For patients that have been discharged from the ED directly, data entry should not commence earlier than 14 days after discharge to allow for documentation of follow-up telephone calls or visits in the case records.
4. As an add-on we have incorporated the opportunity to follow-up on patients prospectively to evaluate the future clinical course after recovery. For this Clinical Course in COVID-19 sub-registry, informed consent of the patient is mandatory. Please let us know if this is feasible in your ED and we will assist you in the endeavor.

The Registry for COVID-19 in the Emergency Room (ReCovER) has been approved by the ethics committee of the Medical Faculty of the University of Cologne
(EK 20-1198, NCT04351854). Since patients are documented retrospectively and anonymously, an informed consent is not necessary. The Registry for COVID-19 in the Emergency Room (ReCovER) uses the general data protection compliant platform clinicalsurveys.net and data are stored on servers in Germany.

• Click here for the preliminary and final approval of the ethics committee of the Medical Faculty of the University of Cologne.
• Click here for the study protocol of the Registry for COVID-19 in the Emergency Room (ReCovER).

If you should need a vote from your local ethics committee, please email us and we will help you to get the approval.

Moreover, we happily provide the study protocol and informed consent form (ICF) for the Clinical Course in COVID-19 sub-registry.