Methods
We performed a retrospective review of the medical records of patients with COVID-19 who were admitted to Shenzhen Third People’s Hospital during January and February 2020, after that the disease had spread to many cities in China, resulting in an inability to determine whether patients got virus infection in Wuhan or other places. In this study we defined the patients who had a history of traveling in Wuhan as WH patients, and those who did not have this history as NWH patients. We analyzed these two groups of patients for clinical characteristics, including cardio-pulmonary function, hepatic function, hemogram, immunologic parameters, viral load and duration, and severity of illness. This study was approved by the Ethics Committee of Shenzhen Third People’s Hospital.
SPSS 18.0 and GraphPad Prism 7 were used to analyze the data, andP <0.05 was considered to be statistically significant. Continuous variables were expressed as the median and interquartile range and categorical variables were expressed as numbers and percentages. Unpaired t tests were used to compare continuous variables and the chi-square or Fisher’s exact test was utilized to compare the proportions of the categorical variables.