key: cord-0932233-njy99jh4
authors: Song, Fang; Zhang, Xiangyan; Zha, Yan; Liu, Weijia
title: COVID‐19: Recommended sampling sites at different stage of the disease
date: 2020-04-16
journal: J Med Virol
DOI: 10.1002/jmv.25892
sha: 49088c7dcd507ae7cea656350628a720c4e30bf0
doc_id: 932233
cord_uid: njy99jh4

Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID‐19) is mainly an acute respiratory infectious disease caused by a novel coronavirus (officially named Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2, SARS‐CoV‐2) in December 2019, which is currently a worldwide pandemic, mainly causes the novel coronavirus pneumonia (NCP). At present, it mainly relies on Real‐time RT‐PCR to detect SARS‐CoV‐2 virus nucleic acid collected from the clinical specimens of patients as the standard for diagnosis, discontinuation of quarantine and discharge.(1,2) This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

Because of the convenience of operation and the acceptability of patients, the most commonly used specimens at discharge in practice are also oropharyngeal swabs, and sometimes nasal swabs are collected at the same time. However, in the middle and later stages of the disease, the amount of virus remaining in pharyngeal cells is small or very low in some patients. If only the pharyngeal specimens are taken, the viral nucleic acid cannot be detected. Although alveolar lavage fluid is easier to detect viruses, due to its inconvenient operation and high risk of exposure, it is mainly used on critically ill patients who have been intubated. 13 Different from the suspected cases with typical clinical characteristics, the diagnosis rate can be improved by detecting the nucleic acid in fecal samples, the latest discharge standards in China still requires only the collection of respiratory specimens 1 . But it has been emphasized in the discharge standard to collect "nasal swab, sputum" and other upper and lower respiratory tract specimens at the same Based on the improvement of clinical symptoms and CT imaging, the guidelines require only two consecutive negative nucleic acid tests (≥24 hours) before discharge can be considered. In clinical practice, there are some severe or critical patients who are discharged from hospital after 2 days of consecutive negative test of throat swabs after glucocorticoid or recovered plasma shock therapy. 15 Due to the long time of 

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