A study of rt-pcr negative covid-19 cases in a tertiary rural health care centre

Introduction: Reports say that many “suspected” cases with archetypal clinical characteristics of COVID-19 and characteristic computed tomography (CT) images went undetected by RT-PCR due to late testing, escape variants and lack of sputum samples through BAL . This study directs to assess the clinical features, laboratory tests, radiological results, complications, and management of these patients who are COVID cases clinically but were RT-PCR negative.
Methodology: It is a descriptive study of RT-PCR negative COVID-19 patients done in a rural tertiary care hospital, Hoskote, Karnataka for 9 months. A total of 2281 cases who presented with COVID-19 symptoms were included in this study, out of which 2204 were tested positive and 77 patients were tested negative for COVID.
Result: Out of these 77 patients, 46(59.74%) were males, and 31(40.25%) were females and the mean average age was 46years. Most were in the age group of less than 40 years. The most frequent clinical symptoms noted in our study were myalgia, productive cough, breathlessness, Diabetes mellitus (27.27%) being the most common co-morbidity with a fatality rate of 12.98%.Conclusion: In patients presenting with clinical symptoms of COVID-19 but with a negative RT-PCR, the diagnosis must rely not only on RT-PCR test results but also on the clinical findings of chest CT and elevated inflammatory markers, and such patients need to be treated with standard COVID-19 protocol.