Key Points of Clinical and CT Imaging Features of 2019 Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV) Imported Pneumonia Based On 21 Cases Analysis

wenxiu Wu; zhifeng xu; yabin Jin; aizhen Pan

All 21 patients in our study all had a history of recent travel to Wuhan or directly contact with NCP patients.This results was convincing proof that the disease is characterized by human-to-human transmission. A new study revealed that the reproductive number of COVID-19 is up to 3.28 [3] . However, in this study, the patients did not be acquired a clear transmission route, because the virus may have multiple transmission modes [12, 13] . Previous study demonstrated that common symptoms at onset of the illness were fever, cough and shortness of breath and with less common symptoms were sputum production, headache and diarrhoea etc [4, 5, 7, 12, 13] . Our results revealed that main symptom of NCP patients manifested as fever (85.7%), cough (80.9%), followed by shortness of breath(42.9%)and fatigue(28.6%),diarrhea and muscle pain,which was consistent with previous studies.However,a large clinical cases(1099 cases) study by professor zhong et al [7] found that only 43.8% showed fever in the early stage, but up to 87.9% showed fever after hospitalization.It dmonstrated that fever is closely related to the development of the disease, therefore fever as a screening indicator may miss a large number of early patients. In addition,our study and all previous showed that diarrhea was rare, and we found that diarrhea only occurred in serve patients. Therefore, it is necessary to pay attention to the damage of digestive tract function in these patients and be alert to the risk of fecal-oral infection. 85.7% of severe cases manifested shortness of breath, were significant higher than that of mild cases. Shortness of breath would be a better indicators to reflect the disease's progression. A new study [12] base on 72314 patients revealed that middle-aged(30-79 years old) and elderly men (51.4%) were prone to the NCP,and looking at the sex ratio, men are more likely to die (2.8%) than women (1.7%). our results showed NCP patients with average 43.1 years old, and men are more likely to be worse(57.1%), showed similar characteristics.