Recurrent Positive Reverse Transcriptase–Polymerase Chain Reaction Results for Coronavirus Disease 2019 in Patients Discharged From a Hospital in China

This case series examines patients with coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) who were discharged from the hospital and had recurrent positive reverse transcriptase–polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) results.


Introduction
Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has become pandemic.Previous studies 1-3 on COVID-19 have been mainly centered on the epidemiology, clinical characteristics, radiological features, and treatment of patients with confirmed infection.Follow-up studies of discharged patients have been rarely reported.

Methods
This case series study was approved by the institutional review board of the Affiliated Hospital of Zunyi Medical University.The need for informed consent was waived because the data were entirely anonymized and the individuals could not be identified.This study follows the Strengthening the Reporting of Observational Studies in Epidemiology (STROBE) reporting guideline.
We collected the clinical data of patients who had been cured and discharged from a hospital designated for patients with COVID-19 in Guizhou Province, China, between January 25, 2020, and February 26, 2020.All COVID-19 infections were classified into 4 different types-mild, moderate, severe, and critical-on the basis of the disease severity. 4Patients could be discharged if they met discharge standards. 4They were required to quarantine for 14 days in a designated hospital, 4 and their nasopharyngeal swabs were usually collected on the 7th and 14th days; however, swabs were

Results
We examined data for 69 patients in total (median age, 33 years; range, 2-78 years; 35 male patients [50.7%]).Eleven of the patients (15.9%) had positive RT-PCR results for the COVID-19 nucleic acid test but without any symptoms.Among the 11 patients (median age, 27 years; range, 4-58 years), there were 7 male patients (63.6%), and 3 patients (27.3%) had comorbidities.Most of the 11 patients had moderate (9 patients) or mild infection (1 patient); only 1 patient was classified as having critical infection.The median interval from discharge to positive RT-PCR results was 14 days (range, 9-17 days).None of the patients were medical staff.There were no substantial differences in the collected anytime if the patients had clinical symptoms.Real-time reverse transcriptase-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) was performed on nasopharyngeal swabs at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention of Guizhou Province.The researchers performed follow-up for all the patients, and the demographic data, clinical symptoms, and radiographic and laboratory results at admission were extracted from the electronic medical records.P values were calculated with Pearson χ 2 tests, Fisher exact tests, or Wilcoxon-Mann-Whitney U tests as appropriate; all tests were 2-sided.Statistical significance was set at P < .05.Data calculations were performed with SPSS statistical software version 22.0 (IBM Corp).Data analysis was performed in April 2020.

Table 1 .
Demographic and Baseline Clinical Characteristics of Patients With Coronavirus Disease 2019 b Wilcoxon-Mann-Whitney U test.

Table 2 .
Clinical Symptoms and Radiographic and Laboratory Findings for Patients With Coronavirus Disease 2019