Abstract
A global outbreak of a novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pneumonia began in December 2019 in Wuhan, China. The World Health Organization (WHO) announced a pandemic on March 11, 2020. The rapid rise in the case numbers and mortality led to the saturation of hospitals in many countries. COVID-19 patients usually present with fever, fatigue, dry cough, and dyspnea. Given the shortage of diagnostic kits in many countries and very high sensitivity of computed tomography (CT) for diagnosis of COVID-19 in clinically suspicious patients, the chest CT has been implemented among the primary initial methods of diagnosis before the confirmatory laboratory tests. This puts radiologists and radiology staff on the front line of this alarming pandemic. This report summarizes chest CT findings of COVID-19 patients to facilitate diagnosis and reviews a list of necessary precautions and safety measures for diagnostic and interventional radiology personnel. These precautionary plans are extremely important to avoid contamination of the health-care providers, as well as cross-contamination between patients.
Highlights
Beginning on December 31, 2019, the World Health Organization (WHO) was informed of a cluster of cases of pneumonia with unknown causes reported in Wuhan, Hubei province, China [1]. e patients presented with progressive pneumonia symptoms including fever, dry cough, fatigue, and respiratory distress
A novel coronavirus, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2, previously known as 2019nCoV), was isolated from the respiratory tract secretions of the patients by January 7, 2020 [2,3,4], and the disease was named as coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) soon thereafter
11% and 30%, respectively, have alarmed the medical community to the potential of these respiratory infections [5, 13]. Despite their high mortality, comparing the number of cases and countries affected by the epidemics demonstrates that the transmission rate of those viruses was significantly lower than that of the novel coronavirus (2019nCoV); Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) affected a total of 2,500 cases in 27 countries, and SARS infected 8,422 cases in 29 countries [5, 14]. is highlights the increased risks of disease exposure and transmission to front-line health-care professionals in treating the patients and the importance of taking necessary precautions and safety measures to protect the health-care personnel during the current pandemic [15, 16]
Summary
Beginning on December 31, 2019, the World Health Organization (WHO) was informed of a cluster of cases of pneumonia with unknown causes reported in Wuhan, Hubei province, China [1]. e patients presented with progressive pneumonia symptoms including fever, dry cough, fatigue, and respiratory distress. 11% and 30%, respectively, have alarmed the medical community to the potential of these respiratory infections [5, 13] Despite their high mortality, comparing the number of cases and countries affected by the epidemics demonstrates that the transmission rate of those viruses was significantly lower than that of the novel coronavirus (2019nCoV); MERS affected a total of 2,500 cases in 27 countries, and SARS infected 8,422 cases in 29 countries [5, 14]. E latest recommendations of WHO include respiratory protection with a standard face mask for the health-care providers while interacting with all patients, unless aerosolgenerating procedures are performed [5, 27, 28].
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