Positive RT-PCR Test Results in 420 Patients Recovered From COVID-19 in Wuhan: An Observational Study

Abstract

Objective: During the follow-up of patients recovered from coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in the quarantine and observation period, some of the cured patients showed positive results again. The recurrent positive RT-PCR test results drew widespread concern. We observed a certain number of cured COVID-19 patients with positive RT-PCR test results and try to analyze the factors that caused the phenomenon. Methods: We conducted an observational study in COVID-19 patients discharged from 6 rehabilitation stations in Wuhan, China. All observed subjects met the criteria for hospital discharge and were in quarantine. Data regarding age, sex, body mass index (BMI), course of disease, comorbidity, smoking status and alcohol consumption, symptoms in and out of quarantine, and intervention were collected from the subjects' medical records and descriptively analyzed. The main outcome of this study was the RT-PCR test result of the observed subjects at the end of quarantine (negative or positive). Logistic regression analysis was used to identify the influencing factors related to recurrent positive RT-PCR test results. Results: In this observational study, 420 observed subjects recovered from COVID-19 were included. The median age was 56 years, 63.6% of the subjects were above 50 years old, and 50.7% (213/420) were female. The most common comorbidities were hypertension [26.4% (111/420)], hyperlipidemia [10.7% (45/420)], and diabetes [10.5% (44/420)]. 54.8% (230/420) manifested one or more symptoms at the beginning of the observation period, the most common symptoms were cough [27.6% (116/420)], shortness of breath 23.8% (100/420)], and fatigue [16.2% (68/420)], with fever rare [2.6% (11/420)]. A total of 325 subjects were exposed to comprehensive intervention; 95

A systematic review and meta-analysis of discharged COVID-19 patients retesting positive for RT-PCR

“…Excluded studies and the reason are shown in appendix pp 107–110. Of the 117 eligible studies, there were 66 case reports [ 5 , 16 – 80 ], 42 case series [ 6 , 81 – 121 ], 3 cohort studies [ [122] , [123] , [124] ], 3 cross-sectional studies [ 125 – 127 ] and 3 case-control studies [ 128 – 130 ]. One hundred studies were from China, 7 from Italy, 3 from Korea, 2 from France, 5 each from Iran, Brunei Darussalam, Switzerland, America and Portugal.…”

Forecasting of COVID-19 using deep layer Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) with Gated Recurrent Units (GRUs) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) cells

“…Whereas, the loss of smell and taste for weeks cannot be considered in defining the recovered cases [38] . However, the reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) test conducted on the four patients who met the criteria for hospital discharge were tested positive after 10 days of the hospital discharge [ 39 , 40 ]. In a study, [8] Fotios presented a brief insight on the importance of recovered cases, They reported the recovered cases are increasing exponentially as the number of days in the pandemic increase.…”

The relationship between SARS-COV-2 RNA positive duration and the risk of recurrent positive

“…7 Administrative Office, The Third People's Hospital of Shenzhen, Shenzhen, China. 8 Department of Hepatology III, The Third People's Hospital of Shenzhen, Shenzhen, China. 9 Department of Internal Medicine, Fankou Branch of Ezhou Central Hospital, Ezhou, China.…”

“…Yang’s study involving 93 re-positive patients showed that 72% (67/93) of the re-positive patients were clinically classified as asymptomatic infection, and the median of viral RNA level in recurrent-positive patients was 3.2 log10 copies/ml (ranged from 1.8 to 5.7) [ 5 ]. Another study involving 420 patients showed that 45.2% (190/420) of re-positive patients were asymptomatic [ 8 ]. As the condition of asymptomatic infection was hidden, the identification of risk factors of recurrent positive was one of the key points of COVID-19 prevention and control [ 13 ].…”

“…At present, COVID-19 recovered patients have more than 50 million worldwide [2], and most of the infected people have lost the virus within 3 weeks [3][4][5]. However, there are numerous reports that some patients are recurrent positive [6][7][8][9][10]. Unfortunately, the mechanism leading to these re-positive cases is still unclear.…”