Publication date: Jul 31, 2025

Key resultsWhen differentiating pneumonia from acute bronchitis/bronchiolitis, common cold/influenza, and COVID-19, out-of-hours physicians mainly considered the patients clinical condition, respiratory rate and lung auscultation. The COVID-19 pandemic brought new diagnostic challenges, with an infection holding various symptoms and clinical findings that may resemble pneumonia . The differences between the findings of the two studies may be due to different APO charts, different clinical settings, or pre-pandemic versus pandemic periods. Moreover, lung auscultation has low sensitivity for pneumonia, and one could argue that better diagnostic modalities should replace auscultation when possible . Here, cough was negatively associated with pneumonia, and fever showed no association (M2), while the combination of fever and cough was highly significant. We found that abnormal lung auscultation was associated with the pneumonia diagnosis, but in combination with fever, this correlation was extinguished. Our results indicate that pneumonia is diagnosed based on clinical signs more than symptoms.

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