prevalence of sars-cov-2 in patients with severe pneumonia in khuzestan province, iran

The emergence of a highly pathogenic virus named severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (sars-cov-2) accounts for severe pneumonia throughout the world. more than 7 million world population have been infected with sars-cov-2, and the number of deaths is increasing every day. this study aimed to evaluate the frequency of sars-cov-2 in hospitalized patients with acute respiratory infection (ari). during an outbreak of the sars-cov-2, the nasopharyngeal and oropharyngeal swabs were collected from 909 hospitalized patients with severe pneumonia, including 517 (56.9%) males and 392 (43.1%) females. all the collected samples were from different cities of khuzestan province from 19 february to- 27 march 2020. the rna was extracted from samples and subjected to real-time polymerase chain reaction (pcr) tests for the detection of the sars-cov-2. simultaneously, the computerized tomography (ct) scan was tested for the presence of ground-glass opacity in the lung among the patients. of the total number of 909 specimens, 328 (36.08%) cases, including 185 (20.35%) females and 143 (15.73%) males, were positive for the sars-cov-2 while, 581 (63.9%) cases, including 374 (41.14%) males and 207 (22.77%) were negative for the sars-cov-2 by real-time pcr (p=0.001).four hundred sixteen (45.76%) cases were positive for ground-glass opacity in the lung by ct scan, while 328/909 (36.08%) trials proved positive for sarscov-2 by the real-time pcr (p=0.003). in this study, 36.08% of patients were positive for sars-cov-2. although the results of positive cases by ct scan showed higher than real-time pcr, screening the sars-cov-2 with a real-time pcr method is the first line of choice.