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 epidemic curve of COVID-19 in Shenzhen had practical implications. Overall, the rapid increase of cases in Shenzhen was interrupted by the massive control measures implemented since Jan 23 and followed by a sustained downward trend. The majority of the cases were imported and the local transmission was limited. Furthermore, most cases were self-identified at the beginning, while cases were more likely to be identified by surveillance . CC-BY-ND 4.0 International license It is made available under a is the author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. Fever and cough were the most common symptoms of COVID-19 on hospital admission in Shenzhen, which was in accordance with findings from a study that included 1099 patients from 30 provinces of China (14) . This county-wide study also reported that the proportion of patients with fever increased (88.7%) after hospital admission, although the proportion (43.8%) on admission was lower than that in our study (67.4%) (14). The overall proportion of patients with cough was lower than that of other study (59.4%) (5); meanwhile, more patients had dry cough (34.3%) than cough with phlegm (15.1%) in our study. The main symptoms were significantly different regarding different exposure sources; patients with Shenzhen exposure were less likely to have fever and cough compared to those with Wuhan exposure. In addition, the patients in our study were less likely to have symptoms compared to those patients reported in Wuhan (15). Interestingly, surveillance-identified patients showed fewer symptoms at the time of identification than those self-identified patients in our study.