Clinical infectious diseases : an official publication of the Infectious Diseases Society of America
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Multicenter Study Observational Study
Factors Associated With Prolonged Viral RNA Shedding in Patients with Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19).
An outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is becoming a public health emergency. Data are limited on the duration and host factors related to viral shedding. ⋯ Male sex, delayed admission to hospital after illness onset, and invasive mechanical ventilation were associated with prolonged SARS-CoV-2 RNA shedding. Hospital admission and general treatments should be started as soon as possible in symptomatic COVID-19 patients, especially male patients.
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In December 2019, a series of pneumonia cases of unknown cause emerged in Wuhan, Hubei, China. In this study, we investigate the clinical and laboratory features and short-term outcomes of patients with coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). ⋯ The mortality rate was high among the COVID-19 patients described in our cohort who met our criteria for inclusion in this analysis. The patient characteristics seen more frequently in those who died were the development of systemic complications following onset of the illness and a severity of disease requiring admission to the ICU. Our data support those described by others indicating that COVID-19 infection results from human-to-human transmission, including familial clustering of cases, and from nosocomial transmission. There were no differences in mortality among those who did or did not receive antimicrobial or glucocorticoid drug treatments.