First Confirmed Cases of 2019 Novel Coronavirus in a University Hospital in Turkey: Housemate Internists

Abstract

Objective: On 30 January 2020, WHO declared that coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak has met the criteria for a Public Health Emergency of International Concern. Here, we report the clinical features and outcome of the first two cases of COVID-19 in a university hospital in Turkey, who were house-mate internists.

Case Presentation: Our first patient was a 28-year-old female who works as a resident in the Internal Medicine Department of a 1200-bed, tertiary care University Hospital. Her initial symptom was fatigue. She developed dry cough, nausea, and myalgia. She had no fever, no shortness of breath, or any other complaints. As the 2019-nCoV PCR test was positive, oral hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin were commenced. After the positive PCR test of the first patient, we screened 85 subjects who had unprotect-ed exposure to her; most of them were her colleagues and other healthcare workers. Test results of all but one were negative. The only person with a positive test result was the 35-year-old female who was the housemate and also a colleague of the first patient.

Discussion: These two cases showed us the desperate situation of COVID-19. To fight an infectious disease that had a high transmission rate, it is important to the infection chain between source and vulnerable subject and transmission route. Unfortunately, to find all infected sources is not possible every time, due to asymptomatic or mild cases, or with low sensitivity diagnostic tests. So, we need to do vigorous isolation pre-cautions and to test more people to end up this pandemic.