J Med Internet Res. 2021 Jun 9. doi: 10.2196/29576. Online ahead of print.
ABSTRACT
BACKGROUND: In general, early intervention based on early diagnosis of the disease is considered to be very important for improving the health outcome. However, there is still not enough evidence of how medical care that is based on the early diagnosis of confirmed cases can affect the COVID-19 treatment outcomes.
OBJECTIVE: Accordingly, we aimed to investigate the effects of the duration from the onset of clinical symptoms to confirmation on the duration to the resolution of COVID-19 (release from quarantine).
METHODS: For preliminary data collection, we performed data crawling to extract data from social networks, blogs, and official websites operated by local governments. We collected data from the 4,002 confirmed cases from 33cities reported until May 31, 2020, for whom sex and age information could be verified. Subsequently, 2,494 patients with unclear symptom onset date and 1,349 patients who had not been released or had no data about the release date were excluded. Thus, 159 patients were finally included in this study. To investigate whether rapid confirmation reduces the prevalence period, we divided the duration from symptoms to confirmation (S2C) into quartiles, 1Q, 2Q, 3Q, and 4Q, of ≤1, ≤3, ≤6, and ≥7 days. We investigated the duration from symptoms to release (S2R) and confirmation to release (C2R) according to these quartiles. Furthermore, we performed multiple regression analysis to investigate the effects of rapid confirmation after symptom onset on the treatment period, duration of prevalence, and the duration until the release from isolation.
RESULTS: We performed multiple regression analysis to investigate the association between rapid confirmation after symptom onset and the total prevalence period (faster release from isolation). S2C showed a negative association with C2R (T-value = -3.58; p<0.001) and a positive association with S2R (T-value = 5.86; p<0.001) that were statistically significant.
CONCLUSIONS: Duration from symptom onset to the confirmation date is an important variable for predicting prevalence, and these results support the hypothesis that rapid S2C could reduce S2R.
PMID:34280114 | DOI:10.2196/29576
