Antibody responses to SARS-CoV-2 in patients of novel coronavirus disease 2019

Juanjuan Zhao; Quan Yuan; Haiyan Wang; Wei Liu; Xuejiao Liao; Yingying Su; Xin Wang; Jing Yuan; Tingdong Li; Jinxiu Li; Shen Qian; Congming Hong; Fuxiang Wang; Yingxia Liu; Zhaoqin Wang; Qing He; Zhiyong Li; Bin He; Tianying Zhang; Shengxiang Ge; Lei Liu; Jun Zhang; Ningshao Xia; Zheng Zhang

The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not peer-reviewed) is . https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.03.02.20030189 doi: medRxiv preprint the efforts to provide appropriated treatment for patients, to limit further spread of the virus and ultimately to eliminate the virus from human society. Currently, viral RNA detection by several polymerase chain reaction (PCR) based technics is almost the only way to confirm the diagnosis of SARS-CoV-2 infection in practice. On the other hand, RNA testing based on throat or nasopharyngeal swabs brought out negligible false-negative risk. 8 The reported positive rate varied for different swab specimens in COVID-19 patients. 3, 9 Many cases that were strongly epidemiologically linked to SARS-CoV-2 exposure and with typical lung radiological findings remained RNA negative in their upper respiratory tract samples. There are four potential reasons: 1) the viral loads in upper respiratory tract samples are much lower than that in lower respiratory tract samples in COVID-19 patients; 9 2) the releasing viral loads of patients in different stage of infection varies with a wide range; 10 3) the collection of high-quality swab specimen requires skillful health-workers; and 4) PCR reagents from different sources have high variance. Consequently, these problems lead to a noteworthy delay of early diagnosis and following management and propose serious challenge to providing timely life support treatment and preventive quarantine.