• Jinru Wu, Xinyi Liu, Dan Zhou, Guangqian Qiu, Miao Dai, Qingting Yang, Zhonghui Pan, Ning Zhou, and Pa Wu.
• College of Life Science, Hunan Normal University, Changsha, China.
• Front Public Health. 2020 Jan 1; 8: 267.

AbstractAsymptomatic individuals with coronavirus disease (COVID-19) have been identified via nucleic acid testing for severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2); however, the epidemiologic characteristics and viral shedding pattern of asymptomatic patients remain largely unknown. In this study, serological testing was applied when identifying nine asymptomatic cases of COVID-19 who showed persistent negative RT-PCR test results for SARS-CoV-2 nucleic acid and no symptoms of COVID-19. Two asymptomatic cases were presumed to be index patients who had cleared the virus when their close contacts developed symptoms of COVID-19. Three of the asymptomatic cases were local individuals who spontaneously recovered before their presumed index patients developed symptoms of COVID-19. This report presents the epidemiologic and clinical characteristics of asymptomatic individuals with SARS-CoV-2 infection that were undetected on RT-PCR tests in previous epidemiologic investigations probably due to the transient viral shedding duration.Copyright © 2020 Wu, Liu, Zhou, Qiu, Dai, Yang, Pan, Zhou and Wu.

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