Clinical features of imported cases of coronavirus disease 2019 in Tibetan patients in the Plateau area

Yu Lei; yunping lan; jianli lu; xiaobo huang; bamu silang; fan zeng

In our study, most patients did not present with typical clinical symptoms at time of admission. This is inconsistent with recent studies, which have most commonly found fever and cough to be the dominant symptoms 3, 4 . In our study, fever was only found in 10% of patients on admission and increased to13.5% during hospitalization. Cough was only presented by 18% of patients. The absence of fever and cough was frequent in our study. Unlike the other studies that included only the cases who actively sought medical attention 3 , our cohort included sub-or preclinical cases identified by local CDC collection of nasal and pharyngeal secretion samples from most residents to detect SARS-CoV-2 nucleic acid, even though the majority of residents had no clinical symptoms or any history of exposure to COVID-19 cases. Through active screening, we found 36 virus carriers without clinical symptoms. If surveillance relies on fever detection or on patients actively seeking medical advice due to clinical symptoms, many potential virus carriers may be missed.