Abstract
We prospectively assessed 49 coronavirus disease cases in Guangdong, China, to estimate the frequency and duration of detectable severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 RNA in human body fluids. The prolonged persistence of virus RNA in various body fluids may guide the clinical diagnosis and prevention of onward virus transmission.
Highlights
We prospectively assessed 49 coronavirus disease cases in Guangdong, China, to estimate the frequency and duration of detectable severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 RNA in human body fluids
In this study, we estimated the time for COVID-19 case-patients to clear SARS-CoV-2 RNA in the acute phase of infection through an accelerated failure time (AFT)-based modeling study
The estimated time until loss of virus RNA detection ranged from 45.6 days for nasopharyngeal swab samples to 46.3 days for feces samples in mild cases and from 48.9 days for nasopharyngeal swab samples to 49.4 days for feces samples in severe cases, which was longer than those of SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV [10,11]
Summary
We prospectively assessed 49 coronavirus disease cases in Guangdong, China, to estimate the frequency and duration of detectable severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 RNA in human body fluids. The confirmation of SARS-CoV-2 infection relies on detection of virus RNA in various body fluids. We used parametric Weibull regression models (AFT) to estimate the time until the loss of SARS-CoV-2 RNA detection in each body fluid and reported findings in medians and 95th percentiles using R software version 3.6.1 with flexsurv, survival, and survminer packages [9].
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