Transmission risk of patients with COVID-19 meeting discharge criteria should be interpreted with caution.

Jun-wei SU; Wen-rui WU; Guan-jing Lang; Hong Zhao; Ji-fang Sheng

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Transmission risk of patients with COVID-19 meeting discharge criteria should be interpreted with caution.

Author: Jun-Wei SU ¹ ; Wen-Rui WU ¹ ; Guan-Jing LANG ¹ ; Hong ZHAO ¹ ; Ji-Fang SHENG ¹
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1. Department of Infectious Diseases, State Key Laboratory for the Diagnosis and Treatment of Infectious Diseases, Collaborative Innovation Center for the Diagnosis and Treatment of Infectious Diseases, National Clinical Research Center for Infectious Diseases, the First Affiliated Hospital, School of Medicine, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310003, China.
Publication Type:Case Reports
Keywords: Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19); severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2); Real-time polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR)
MeSH: Adult; Betacoronavirus; China; Clinical Laboratory Techniques; Coronavirus Infections; diagnosis; transmission; Female; Humans; Male; Middle Aged; Pandemics; Patient Discharge; Pneumonia, Viral; diagnosis; transmission; Real-Time Polymerase Chain Reaction; Reverse Transcriptase Polymerase Chain Reaction; Sputum; virology
From: Journal of Zhejiang University. Science. B 2020;21(5):408-410
CountryChina
Language:English
Abstract: As of Apr. 22, 2020, the World Health Organization (2020) has reported over 2.4 million confirmed coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) patients and 169 151 deaths. Recent articles have uncovered genomic characteristics and clinical features of COVID-19 (Chan et al., 2020; Chang et al., 2020; Guan et al., 2020; Zhu et al., 2020), while our understanding of COVID-19 is still limited. As suggested by guidelines promoted by the General Office of National Health Commission of the People's Republic of China (2020) (from Versions 1 to 6), discharged standards for COVID-19 were still dependent on viral real-time polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) tests of respiratory specimens, showing that recovered COVID-19 patients with twice negative RT-PCR could meet discharge criteria. Here, we examined two cases in which nucleic acid test results were inconsistent with clinical and radiological findings, leading to suboptimal care.