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Abstract Background The novel coronavirus SARS-19 produces ‘COVID-19’ in patients with symptoms. COVID-19 patients admitted to the hospital require early assessment and care including isolation. The National Early Warning Score (NEWS) and its updated version NEWS2 is a simple physiological scoring system used in hospitals, which may be useful in the early identification of COVID-19 patients. We investigate the performance of multiple enhanced NEWS2 models in predicting the risk of COVID-19. Methods Our cohort included unplanned adult medical admissions discharged over 3 months (11 March 2020 to 13 June 2020 ) from two hospitals (YH for model development; SH for external model validation). We used logistic regression to build multiple prediction models for the risk of COVID-19 using the first electronically recorded NEWS2 within ± 24 hours of admission. Model M0’ included NEWS2; model M1’ included NEWS2 + age + sex, and model M2’ extends model M1’ with subcomponents of NEWS2 (including diastolic blood pressure + oxygen flow rate + oxygen scale). Model performance was evaluated according to discrimination (c statistic), calibration (graphically), and clinical usefulness at NEWS2 ≥ 5. Results The prevalence of COVID-19 was higher in SH (11.0 %=277/2520) than YH (8.7 %=343/3924) with a higher first NEWS2 scores ( SH 3.2 vs YH 2.8) but similar in-hospital mortality (SH 8.4 % vs YH 8.2 %). The c-statistics for predicting the risk of COVID-19 for models M0’,M1’,M2’ in the development dataset were: M0’: 0.71 (95 %CI 0.68–0.74); M1’: 0.67 (95 %CI 0.64–0.70) and M2’: 0.78 (95 %CI 0.75–0.80)). For the validation datasets the c-statistics were: M0’ 0.65 (95 %CI 0.61–0.68); M1’: 0.67 (95 %CI 0.64–0.70) and M2’: 0.72 (95 %CI 0.69–0.75) ). The calibration slope was similar across all models but Model M2’ had the highest sensitivity (M0’ 44 % (95 %CI 38-50 %); M1’ 53 % (95 %CI 47-59 %) and M2’: 57 % (95 %CI 51-63 %)) and specificity (M0’ 75 % (95 %CI 73-77 %); M1’ 72 % (95 %CI 70-74 %) and M2’: 76 % (95 %CI 74-78 %)) for the validation dataset at NEWS2 ≥ 5. Conclusions Model M2’ appears to be reasonably accurate for predicting the risk of COVID-19. It may be clinically useful as an early warning system at the time of admission especially to triage large numbers of unplanned hospital admissions.