• Jinjun Ran, Shi Zhao, Zian Zhuang, ChongMarc K CMKCJC School of Public Health and Primary Care, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China; Shenzhen Research Institute of Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, China. Electronic address: marc@cuhk.edu.hk., Yongli Cai, Peihua Cao, Kai Wang, Yijun Lou, Weiming Wang, Daozhou Gao, Lin Yang, Daihai He, and Maggie H Wang.
• School of Public Health, Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine, University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China. Electronic address: jimran@connect.hku.hk.
• Int. J. Infect. Dis. 2020 Jul 1; 96: 284-287.

BackgroundsThe emerging virus, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), caused a large outbreak of coronavirus disease, COVID-19, in Wuhan, China, since December 2019. COVID-19 soon spread to other regions of China and overseas. In Hong Kong, local mitigation measures were implemented since the first imported case was confirmed on January 23, 2020. Here we evaluated the temporal variation of detection delay from symptoms onset to laboratory confirmation of SARS-CoV-2 in Hong Kong.MethodsA regression model is adopted to quantify the association between the SARS-CoV-2 detection delay and calendar time. The association is tested and further validated by a Cox proportional hazard model.FindingsThe estimated median detection delay was 9.5 days (95%CI: 6.5-11.5) in the second half of January, reduced to 6.0 days (95%CI: 5.5-9.5) in the first half of February 2020. We estimate that SARS-CoV-2 detection efficiency improved at a daily rate of 5.40% (95%CI: 2.54-8.33) in Hong Kong.ConclusionsThe detection efficiency of SARS-CoV-2 was likely being improved substantially in Hong Kong since the first imported case was detected. Sustaining enforcement in timely detection and other effective control measures are recommended to prevent the SARS-CoV-2 infection.Copyright © 2020 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.

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