An outbreak of acute respiratory disease caused by a novel coronavirus of zoonotic origin (SARS-CoV-2) occurred during December 2019 in Wuhan, Hubei province of China. Additional cases have been subsequently identified both in other parts of China and worldwide [1, 2]. World Health Organization officially names the disease COVID-19 [3]. Common clinical manifestations of COVID-19 include fever, cough, shortness of breath, myalgia, and fatigue [4, 5]. Although detection of viral RNA remains the gold standard for diagnosis, false-negative results are not uncommon. The possible reasons may include the lack of standard operation procedures (SOPs) and validation across different laboratories for viral identification, different viral loads at different anatomical sites and high mutation rates. Consequently, clinical diagnosis is generally based on exposure history, clinical symptoms, results of blood and biochemical tests, and findings on chest computed tomography (CT)—which typically consist of ground-glass opacities (GGOs) or bilateral pulmonary consolidations in multiple lobular and sub-segmental areas [4, 6].