Can Lung US Help Critical Care Clinicians in the Early Diagnosis of Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) Pneumonia?

Dear Editor: As reported by Feng et al, chest CT has a pivotal role for the diagnosis and assessment of lung involvement in COVID-19 pneumonia (1). Nowadays CT protocols are used to estimate the pulmonary damage (1,2,3). Unfortunately, CT scanning is not available in all emergency departments. Lung US is a surface imaging technique greatly developed in the last decades and strongly recommended for acute respiratory failure (4). It is commonly used in the emergency department at the bedside for early diagnosis of pneumonia. It is a highly sensitive and specific technique considered as an alternative to chest radiography or CT scanning (5,6). We evaluated the role of lung US in patients who presented to our emergency department with COVID-19 pneumonia. Twelve patients (9 male and 3 female, mean age