The cross-sectional study of hospitalized coronavirus disease 2019 patients in Xiangyang, Hubei province

Jinwei Ai; Junwen Chen; Yong Wang; Xiaoyun Liu; Wufeng Fan; Gaojing Qu; Meiling Zhang; Shengduo Polo Pei; Bowen Tang; Shuai Yuan; Yang Li; Lisha Wang; Guoxin Huang; Bin Pei

The copyright holder for this preprint . https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.02. 19.20025023 doi: medRxiv preprint This study is a cross-sectional study, which only described and analyzed COVID-19 patients with positive real-time RT-PCR results. However, concerning the low sensitivity of throat swabs virus RNA detection in previous studies [20, 21, 24] , we speculated that a part of suspected patients or undiagnosed patients might be COVID-19 positive cases. Thus, studies excluding those patients may not actually reflect the real picture of clinical and epidemiological feature of SARS-CoV-2 infected population. Also, accounting for the limited follow-up duration, our data may not reflect the complete course of COVID-19 development. In addition, it is a cross-sectional study with limited ability to infer the causal associations. In the current state of emergency, we hoped that our data-based findings could provide help for disease prevention, control, diagnosis and treatment.