Severity of illness scores are used for benchmarking and assessment of adjusted mortality in intensive care units (ICU). Te Acute Physiology and Chronic Health Evaluation (APACHE) and the Simplifed Acute Physiology Score (SAPS) 3 scores were recently evaluated in ICU patients with coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) with conficting fndings. While in the cohorts from United Kingdom and United States ICU scores underestimated the actual mortality and poorly stratifed disease severity, analyses from Austria using the SAPS-3 with frst-level customization suggested satisfactory performance. In this study, we aimed to evaluate the performance of SAPS-3 to predict hospital mortality in a large cohort of COVID-19 patients admitted to ICUs in Brazil.