ABSTRACT
BACKGROUND: In December 2019, a novel pneumonia related to the 2019 coronavirus unexpectedly developed in Wuhan, China. We aimed to review data of the novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV) by analyzing all the published retrospective studies on the clinical, epidemiological, laboratory, and radiological characteristics of patients with 2019-nCoV. METHODS: We searched in four bibliographic databases PubMed, Scopus, Embase, and Web of Science) for studies March 10, 2020 focused on the clinical, epidemiological, laboratory, and radiological characteristics of patients with 2019-nCoV for meta-analysis. The Newcastle-Ottawa Scale was used to quality assessment, and publication bias was analyzed by Egger's test. In the meta-analysis, a random-effects model with Stata/SE software, v.14.1 (StataCorp, College Station, TX) was used to obtain a pooled incidence rate. RESULTS: Fifty studies were included in this systematic review and meta-analysis with 8815 patients and the mean age was 46 years and 4647 (52.7%) were male. The pooled incidences rate of clinical symptoms were: fever (83%, 95% CI: 0.77, 0.89), cough (59%, 95% CI: 0.48, 0.69), myalgia or fatigue (31%, 95% CI: 0.23, 0.39), sputum production (29%, 95% CI: 0.21, 0.39), and dyspnea (19%, 95% CI: 0.12, 0.26). The pooled incidence rate of acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) was (22%, 95% CI: 0.00, 0.60). CONCLUSION: The results of this systemic review and meta-analysis present a quantitative pooled incidence rate of different characters of 2019-nCoV and has great potential to develop diagnosis and patient's stratification in 2019-nCoV. However, this conclusions of this study still requisite to be warranted by more careful design, larger sample size multivariate studies to corroborate the results of this meta-analysis.