Patients
A total of 170 patients were recruited from Zhejiang Provincial People’s Hospital from March 2019 to October 2020. The inclusion criteria were age > 18 years and suspicion of BSI. Suspected BSI was defined if the patient had a sudden high fever (T ≥ 38.5 °C) accompanied by hemodynamic instability that could not be explained by a site-specific infection at another body site. In addition, the recruited patient also presented life-threatening organ dysfunction with an increase of 2 points or more in the sepsis-related organ failure assessment score (Warhurst, et al., 2015, Timsit, et al., 2020). The demographic and clinical characteristics of each patient were collected within the first 24 h of suspicion of BSI and summarized inTable 3 . Telephone follow-up interviews were conducted with surviving patients. An unfavorable outcome was defined as 28-day all-cause mortality after ICU admission. This study was approved by the Institutional Review Board and the Ethics Committee of Zhejiang Provincial People’s Hospital (No. 2019KY002). All patients provided informed written consent.