Optimizing diagnostic strategy for novel coronavirus pneumonia, a multi-center study in Eastern China

Jing-Wen Ai; Hao-Cheng Zhang; Teng Xu; Jing Wu; Mengqi Zhu; Yi-Qi Yu; Han-Yue Zhang; Zhongliang Shen; Yang Li; Xian Zhou; Guo-Qing Zang; Jie Xu; Wen-Jing Chen; Yong-Jun Li; De-Sheng Xie; Ming-Zhe Zhou; Jing-Ying Sun; Jia-Zhen Chen; Wen-Hong Zhang

Apart from the transmission pattern and characteristics of this virus, one of the reasons for the initial rapid growth of infected-patient numbers was insufficient ability to rapidly detect such a huge amount of suspected cases, especially in a city with more than 10 million populations. This could then led to the untimely discover and quarantine patients infected with SARS-COV-2, further aggravate the epidemics. Outside Hubei Province, sporadic and clustered cases have continuously reported within China, and most of the provinces and municipalities had confirmed around 50-1000 cases. Other countries including USA, South Korea, Japan and etc, also had sporadic and clustered reports 5, 6, [8] [9] [10] . Currently, the epidemics control outside Hubei province and other countries has entered into a critical stage. To control and eliminate the epidemics is still the main task till now; thus to prevent a single spark to start a prairie fire, as what we had observed in Wuhan, is critical. Therefore, optimizing diagnostic strategy is urgent and essential for the future global SARS-COV-2 control and prevention.