The Issue of Recurrently Positive Patients Who Recovered From COVID-19 According to the Current Discharge Criteria: Investigation of Patients from Multiple Medical Institutions in Wuhan, China.
- Resource Type
- journal article
- Authors
- Zou, You; Wang, Bin-Ru; Sun, Liu; Xu, Shan; Kong, Yong-Gang; Shen, Li-Jun; Liang, Geng-Tian; Chen, Shi-Ming
- Source
- Journal of Infectious Diseases. Dec2020, Vol. 222 Issue 11, p1784-1788. 5p.
- Subject
- *COVID-19
*REVERSE transcriptase polymerase chain reaction
- Language
- ISSN
- 0022-1899
The current discharge criteria for COVID-19 require that patients have 2 consecutive negative results for reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) detection. Here, we observed that recurrent positive RT-PCR test results in patients with 3 consecutive negative results (5.4%) were significantly decreased compared with those in patients with 2 consecutive negative results (20.6%); such patients reported positive RT-PCR test results within 1 to 12 days after meeting the discharge criteria. These results confirmed that many recovered patients could show a positive RT-PCR test result, and most of these patients could be identified by an additional RT-PCR test prior to discharge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]