Introduction
The recent severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) outbreak is the third novel CoV within the last 17 years. Most patients present with mild symptoms such as fever, cough, expectoration, headache, myalgia or fatigue, or dyspnea(1, 2). Some patients report gastrointestinal manifestations that precede respiratory illness and fever by 1-2 days. However, other patients may develop lethal complications such as pneumonia, acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), RNAaemia, and multi-organ failure. It is apparent that SARS-CoV-2 is now much more hazardous than expected compared to previous outbreaks such as the H1N1 pandemic which caused 12,429 deaths over a year while SARS-CoV-2 caused more than 13,000 over 5 weeks in the USA(3). Moreover, the influenza pandemic which infected one third of world’s population and resulted in 50 million deaths in 1918 had a basic reproductive number (BRN) of 1.8 only while SARS-CoV-2 has an estimated BRN (R0) of >2-3(4, 5).
Unlike other viral infections such as SARS, SARS-CoV-2 is highly contagious with a relatively long asymptomatic period. Moreover, there is evidence of pre-symptomatic transmission of the virus(6). Given the similarity in viral load between symptomatic and asymptomatic patients(7), controlling SARS-CoV-2 transmission is highly challenging. This retrospective analysis reports the epidemiologic features, clinical characters, radiological and laboratory findings, and outcomes of 19 patients with PCR-confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection in Germany.