Correlation between clinical symptomatology and RT-PCR results in the diagnosis of COVID-19: An analysis using routine data in Burkina Faso

This study aimed to evaluate the correlation between suspected COVID-19 symptoms and RT-PCR results in the diagnosis of SARS-CoV-2 infection in Burkina Faso. We analyzed SARS-CoV-2 RT-PCR routine diagnostic data in Burkina Faso. Data were collected from March 9, 2020 to September 30, 2020 in the framework of the COVID-19 surveillance. Sensitivity, specificity, predictive values, and Kappa concordance were used to check the correlation between COVID-19 symptoms and the RT-PCR results. A total of 2217 participants were tested for COVID-19 using RT-PCR, of them 779 COVID-19 positive. The mean age of the participants was 38.7± 17.69 years. Suspected symptoms presented by participants were fever (40.4%), cough (38.6%), asthenia (27.3%), headache (23.6%), dyspnea (20.8%), and odynophagia (16.3%). The sensitivity of presence of at least a clinical sign compared to RT-PCR results was 62.13% and the specificity was 39.85%. The kappa agreement between the presence of COVID-19 suspected symptoms and RT-PCR results was 0.017. The presence of aguesia and/or anosmia in patients induced a positive predictive value of RT-PCR of 91.30%. : The correlation between the COVID-19 symptoms and RT-PCR results in the diagnosis of COVID-19 was very weak. The present study confirms that most clinical signs associated with SARS-CoV-2 infection are not specific to COVID-19, hence the need to always combine RT-PCR or other biological tests with the clinical diagnosis. However, aguesia and anosmia are of interest with a high degree of RT-PCR positivity when present in a COVID-19 suspected patient.