Gastrointestinal tract symptoms in coronavirus disease 2019: Analysis of clinical symptoms in adult patients

Yong Zhang

The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not peer-reviewed) is the . https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.03.23.20040279 doi: medRxiv preprint interviews was 26.78 ± 9.16 days, which far exceeds the duration in other studies. For example, Gong et al. showed that the mean disease course of deceased patients was 10.56 ± 4.42 days. 12 Furthermore, in contrast to cough and other symptoms, diarrhoea in COVID-19 patients lasted for a short duration and mostly occurred as mushy stools instead of watery diarrhoea in SARS. 4 Therefore, diarrhoea may be overlooked by clinicians and patients during COVID-19. As digestive tract symptoms such as diarrhoea, nausea, and vomiting tend to be overlooked in 15 Our study showed that digestive tract symptoms such as diarrhoea, nausea, and vomiting are common in COVID-19, suggesting that the possibility of fecal-oral transmission is high. Therefore, we need to actively promote hand hygiene to prevent this disease. Moreover, public health authorities need to actively manage digestive tract excretions from patients to prevent the spread of COVID-19.