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), but there were no differences on age, sex, other epidemiologic features and comorbidities between the two groups (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.