False negative of RT‐PCR and prolonged nucleic acid conversion in COVID‐19: Rather than recurrence

A novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) threatens the world. We read with interest the recent report by Li et al1 that included 610 patients with COVID-19. They reported a high false-negative rate of real-time reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) results for SARS-CoV-2 detection. In addition, a recent report regarding SARS-CoV-2 “turn positive” in recovered cases with COVID-19 was published.2 Here, we studied the characteristics of nucleic acid conversion for SARS-CoV-2 from 70 COVID-19 patients. We found that 15 (21.4%) patients experienced a “turn positive” of nucleic acid detection by RT-PCR test for…