Background: Since December, 2019, Wuhan, China, has experienced an outbreak of 2019 novel coronavirus pneumonia (COVID-19). Epidemiological and clinical characteristics of patients with COVID-19 have been reported. A few studies reported clinical course of illness of median 22 days, including viral shedding of median 20 days, but there are several cases with a longer time of viral shedding.Methods: In this retrospective, single-centre cohort study, we included four cases with a longer course of

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... illness of more than 40 days with laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 from Wuhan Pulmonary Hospital (Wuhan, China) who had been discharged or still in hospital by March 15, 2020. Demographic, clinical, treatment, and laboratory data, including serial samples for viral RNA detection, were extracted from electronic medical records. We describe the epidemiological and clinical characteristics and the course of viral shedding.Results: Of the four patients, one was discharged and the other three were still in hospital. Two patients had comorbidity, one with hypertension and one with diabetes. We found smoking is not an independent risk factor . And D-Dimer maybe relates to severity of illness but not course of illness. Decreased lymphocyte count had a slow recovery process in three patients. elevated eosinophils count in all patients suggest maybe elevated eosinophils count was a reason of long course. Nucleic acid detection suggests maybe more sampling sites represent more virus replication sites and longer course illness.Conclusion: In this study we find some non-critical severe relatively young patients with sustained non-negative with nucleic acid detection whose character is different from former studies described. Of course, it needs much more cases to further study. It's hoped to provide strategy of isolation of infected patients and optimal antiviral interventions in the future.