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Scoring System for the Diagnosis of COVID-19



Mohamed Farouk Allam1, *
1 Department of Family Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, Ain Shams University, Cairo, Egypt


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Creative Commons License
© 2020 Mohamed Farouk Allam.

open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode. This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

* Address correspondence to this author at the Department of Family Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, Ain Shams University, 11566 Abbasia, Cairo, Egypt; Tel/Fax: +(202) 24346888; E-mail: farouk.allam@med.asu.edu.eg


Abstract

Due to the international spread of COVID-19, the difficulty of collecting nasopharyngeal swab specimen from all suspected patients, the costs of RT-PCR and CT, and the false negative results of RT-PCR assay in 41% of COVID-19 patients, a scoring system is needed to classify the suspected patients in order to determine the need for follow-up, home isolation, quarantine or the conduction of further investigations. A scoring system is proposed as a diagnostic tool for suspected patients. It includes Epidemiological Evidence of Exposure, Clinical Symptoms and Signs, and Investigations (if available). This scoring system is simple, could be calculated in a few minutes, and incorporates the main possible data/findings of any patient.

Keywords: Nasopharyngeal swab, COVID-19, diagnosis, RT-PCR, CT, Score system.