Epidemiological and clinical characteristics of COVID-19 in Shenzhen, the largest migrant city of China

Ying Wen; Lan Wei; Yuan Li; Xiujuan Tang; Shuo Feng; Kathy Leung; Xiaoliang Wu; Xiong-Fei Pan; Cong Chen; Junjie Xia; Xuan Zou; Tiejian Feng; Shujiang Mei

The most common symptoms of COVID-19 were fever (67.4%), dry cough (34.3%), and myalgia (28.5%). Patients who were exposed in Wuhan (78.1%), identified by surveillance (83.6%), or scattered (78.2%) were more likely to have fever (P<0.001). Patients with Shenzhen exposure were less likely to have dry cough (21.3%) than patients with Wuhan exposure (35.7%) and elsewhere exposure (39.8%); they were also less likely to have myalgia (26.7%) than those with Wuhan exposure (33.5%). Patients who were identified by surveillance were less likely to have symptoms than the self-identified, such as fever (41.6% vs 83.6%), dry cough (23.0% vs 41.4%), myalgia (10.6% vs 39.8%), sore throat (8.1% vs 19.1%), and headache (8.1% vs 16.4%). Figure 3A ). Generally, surveillance-identified patients had shorter time intervals between illness onset, the first medical visit, hospital admission, and PCR confirmation than those self-identified patients, with the estimates to be 1.0 vs 2.0 days, 0 vs 1.0 day, 0 vs 1.0 day, respectively (P<0.05 for all; Table 1 , Figure 3B ). The scattered cases had a longer time interval from the first medical visit to hospital admission than the clustered cases (1.0 vs 0 day, P<0.05; Table 1, Figure 3C ).