Development and validation of an individualized nomogram for early prediction of the duration of SARS-CoV-2 shedding in COVID-19 patients with non-severe disease

Abstract

With the number of cases of coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19) increasing rapidly, the World Health Organization (WHO) has recommended that patients with mild or moderate symptoms could be released from quarantine without nucleic acid retesting, and self-isolate in the community. This may pose a potential virus transmission risk. We aimed to develop a nomogram to predict the duration of viral shedding for individual COVID-19 patients. This retrospective multicentric study enrolled 135 patients as a training cohort and 102 patients as a validation cohort. Significant factors associated with the duration of viral shedding were identified by multivariate Cox modeling in the training cohort and combined to develop a nomogram to predict the probability of viral shedding at 9, 13, 17, and 21 d after admission. The nomogram was validated in the validation cohort and evaluated by concordance index (C-index), area under the curve (AUC), and calibration curve. A higher absolute lymphocyte count (P=0.001) and lymphocyte-to-monocyte ratio (P=0.013) were correlated with a shorter duration of viral shedding, while a longer activated partial thromboplastin time (P=0.007) prolonged the viral shedding duration. The C-indices of the nomogram were 0.732 (95% confidence interval (CI): 0.685–0.777) in the training cohort and 0.703 (95% CI: 0.642–0.764) in the validation cohort. The AUC showed a good discriminative ability (training cohort: 0.879, 0.762, 0.738, and 0.715 for 9, 13, 17, and 21 d; validation cohort: 0.855, 0.758, 0.728, and 0.706 for 9, 13, 17, and 21 d), and calibration curves were consistent between outcomes and predictions in both cohorts. A predictive nomogram for viral shedding duration based on three easily accessible factors was developed to help estimate appropriate self-isolation time for patients with mild or moderate symptoms, and to control virus transmission.