Transmission risk of patients with COVID-19 meeting discharge criteria should be interpreted with caution
- PDF / 404,520 Bytes
- 3 Pages / 595.22 x 842 pts (A4) Page_size
- 74 Downloads / 147 Views
1
Journal of Zhejiang University-SCIENCE B (Biomedicine & Biotechnology) ISSN 1673-1581 (Print); ISSN 1862-1783 (Online) www.jzus.zju.edu.cn; www.springerlink.com E-mail: [email protected]
Correspondence:
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†‡ 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 † E-mail: [email protected] https://doi.org/10.1631/jzus.B2000117
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. ‡
Corresponding author Project supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 81670567) and the National Science and Technology Major Project of China (No. 2018ZX10715014-004-002) ORCID: Jun-wei SU, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1762-1079; Ji-fang SHENG, https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0732-1555 © Zhejiang University and Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020 *
We enrolled two cases of COVID-19 who met the discharge criteria posted by the guideline as follows: (1) afebrile maintained for at least 3 d; (2) respiratory symptoms improved significantly; (3) viral nucleic acid test being negative at least twice (each interval greater than 24 h); (4) lung image showing that lesions were significantly improved or completely absorbed; and (5) no oxygen therapy and pulse oxygen saturation (SpO2) of >93%. In concern of transmission risk of discharged patients, another detection of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) was done before discharge, while both of the RT-PCR results were positive. Patients’ data were collected from the First Affiliated Hospital, School of Medicine, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China. Chest computed tomography (CT) was performed. Sputum was sampled for detection of SARSCoV-2 through RT-PCR (Shanghai BioGerm Medical Biotechnology Co., Ltd.
Data Loading...
