Stability issues of RT‐PCR testing of SARS‐CoV‐2 for hospitalized patients clinically diagnosed with COVID‐19

By Yafang Li, L. Yao, Jiawei Li, Lei Chen, Yiyan Song, Z. Cai, Chunhua Yang. Journal of Medical Virology, 2020

648 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In this study, we collected a total of 610 hospitalized patients from Wuhan between February 2, 2020, and February 17, 2020. We reported a potentially high false negative rate of real‐time reverse‐transcriptase polymerase chain reaction (RT‐PCR) testing for SARS‐CoV‐2 in the 610 hospitalized patients clinically diagnosed with COVID‐19 during the 2019 outbreak. We also found that the RT‐PCR results from several tests at different points were variable from the same patients during the course of diagnosis and treatment of these patients. Our results indicate that in addition to the emphasis on RT‐PCR testing, clinical indicators such as computed tomography images should also be used not only for diagnosis and treatment but also for isolation, recovery/discharge, and transferring for hospitalized patients clinically diagnosed with COVID‐19 during the current epidemic. These results suggested the urgent needs for the standard of procedures of sampling from different anatomic sites, sample transportation, optimization of RT‐PCR, serology diagnosis/screening for SARS‐CoV‐2 infection, and distinct diagnosis from other respiratory diseases such as fluenza infections as well.

Subfields: Infectious Diseases, Radiology, Nuclear Medicine and Imaging

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/edb9041d6c94c57256ea806708563024b8d5c69f

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In Infectious Diseases

In Radiology, Nuclear Medicine and Imaging

Citations in the corpus

The Role of Chest Imaging in Patient Management During the COVID-19 Pandemic (2020, neutral): “Early reports of test performance in the Wuhan outbreak showed variable sensitivities ranging from 37% to 71% (4, 5).”
False-negative results of initial RT-PCR assays for COVID-19: A systematic review (2020, methodology): “Li Y 2020 (49) February 217 China Hankou Hospital of Wuhan, China Median 57; range: 22 to 88 b 56:44 b Pharyngeal swab specimens Shengxiang Biotechnology Co (novel coronavirus 2019-nCoV nucleic acid detection kit (fluorescence PCR method) d ORF1ab d”
COVID-Net: a tailored deep convolutional neural network design for detection of COVID-19 cases from chest X-ray images (2020, background): “While RT-PCR testing for COVID-19 is highly specific, its sensitivity is variable depending on sampling method and time since onset of symptoms [2, 3, 4], and some studies have reported relatively low COVID-19 sensitivity [5, 3].”
COVIDGR Dataset and COVID-SDNet Methodology for Predicting COVID-19 Based on Chest X-Ray Images (2020, background): “Some studies found that RT-PCR results from several tests at different points from the same patients were variable during the course of the illness producing a high falsenegative rate [3].”
CO-RADS – A categorical CT assessment scheme for patients with suspected COVID-19: definition and evaluation (2020, background): “Mathias Prokop, MD, PhD* (1); Wouter van Everdingen, MD, PhD* (1), Tjalco van Rees Vellinga, MD (2); Jet Quarles van Ufford, MD, PhD (2); Lauran Stöger, MD, PhD (3); Ludo Beenen, MD (4); Bram Geurts, MD (1), Hester Gietema (5,6), Jasenko Krdzalic, MD, PhD (7), Cornelia Schaefer-Prokop, MD, PhD (8), ”