COVID-19 suspicion and diagnosis: are we still chasing epidemiological criteria?

ABSTRACT

Italy was the second nation after China to be most involved into the COVID-19 outbreak. From the beginning, much attention has been attributed to the importance of epidemiological criteria (such as previous contact with confirmed COVID-19 cases, recent journey across China or the northern Italian regions) in order to assess a suspected patient for SARS-CoV-2 infection. Despite this, by now evidences do exist about the possibly huge reservoir of asymptomatic patients and its underestimated ability to spread the infection. Thus, we do believe that when an infectious disease has a big ratio of asymptomatic cases, as for COVID-19, it is simply not safe to rely on epidemiological criteria and we briefly discuss this issue throughout the few new evidences there are about. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.