Figure 3.

Comparisons of temporal patterns of viral load according to age group, clinical severity, clinical symptoms, and days from admission to negative conversion.

(A) Age group; (B) Changes in clinical severity score from the first 24 h of hospital admission and the maximum score during hospitalization; (C) Type of symptoms observed from hospital admission to discharge (respiratory symptoms included cough, sputum production, sore throat, runny nose, and dyspnea; other symptoms included those listed in Table 1 other than fever and respiratory symptoms); (D) Delayed time to negative conversion (17 days based on the median duration from admission to the first negative real-time polymerase chain reaction [RT-PCR] result). The dashed line refers to the cutoff value for negative RT-PCR results. Only results for the E gene from upper respiratory tract (URT) specimens are presented here, as URT specimens were collected from all patients, and E gene is used as a screening test in the RT-PCR protocols.