Clinical features of novel coronavirus infection patients and a feasible screening procedure / 中华急诊医学杂志

ABSTRACT

Objective:To study the clinical characteristics of novel coronavirus pneumonia (COVID-19) patients and make a feasible screening process in fever clinic.Methods:Epidemiologic features, clinical presentation, laboratory findings and image features of the screened patients were retrospectively collected and analyzed.Results:A total of 46 patients were screened, 9 of them were laboratory-confirmed novel coronavirus infection, and others were defined as laboratory-excluded patients. Laboratory-confirmed patients had higher frequency of travelling or residence in Wuhan within two weeks of onset ( P<0.05), but there were no differences on age, sex, other epidemiologic features and comorbidities between the two groups ( P>0.05). The most common feature of the laboratory-confirmed patients was fever (100%), but the symptoms showed no differences between the two groups ( P>0.05). Laboratory-confirmed patients had lower white blood cell count than the laboratory-excluded patients ( P<0.05), and all of them had pneumonia in chest CT scan. None of the patients with normal chest CT had positive novel coronavirus nucleic acid test. Conclusions:No specific symptom is helpful in the diagnosis of novel coronavirus infection. However, patients without chest CT scan changes have a very low risk of novel coronavirus infection despite of the epidemiologic history and fever. We recommended a screening procedure that might help to reduce the rate of miss diagnosis and improve screening efficiency.