Clinical features of 2019 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 2019 coronavirus (2019-nCoV) pneumonia 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 Totally, 46 patients were screened, 9 of them were laboratory-confirmed 2019-nCoV 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). 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 2019-nCoV nucleic acid test. Conclusions No specific symptom was helpful in the diagnosis of 2019-nCoV infection. However, patients without chest CT scan changes had a very low risk of 2019-nCoV infection despite of the epidemiologic history and fever. We recommended a screening procedure that might be helpful to reduce the rate of miss diagnosis and improve screening efficiency. Key words: 2019-nCoV; pneumonia; fever; chest CT