ABSTRACT
Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has rapidly evolved into a pandemic, causing a global public health crisis. Many frontline healthcare workers providing ear, nose and throat services have been reported to contract COVID-19 at work. Early during the COVID-19 outbreak, several medical professionals in Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery were infected in Wuhan, China. A series of measures were then taken immediately, which successfully halted the spread of the disease. Here we would like to share the lessons we have learned, and our experience to protect our health care workers during the COVID-19 pandemic.
ABSTRACT
The current discharge criteria for COVID-19 require that patients have 2 consecutive negative results for reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) detection. Here, we observed that recurrent positive RT-PCR test results in patients with 3 consecutive negative results (5.4%) were significantly decreased compared with those in patients with 2 consecutive negative results (20.6%); such patients reported positive RT-PCR test results within 1 to 12 days after meeting the discharge criteria. These results confirmed that many recovered patients could show a positive RT-PCR test result, and most of these patients could be identified by an additional RT-PCR test prior to discharge.