Among all the CT findings, GGO was the most common one in both the early and progressive stages of COVID-19 and was characterized by multiple sized lesions, mainly distributed in the peripheral lung (96.8%). An analysis of thin-section CT images of SARS patients showed that multiple GGOs were the main imaging finding (68.4%) and were distributed in the periphery of the lung (71.8%), with interlobular septal thickening (24.2%) and intralobular interstitial hyperplasia (32.2%), also called the crazy-paving pattern. These findings are very similar to the CT manifestations of COVID-19 [20]. For pneumonia caused by MERS-CoV, GGO was also found on the chest CT images and was mainly distributed in the subpleural and basilar lung regions [21, 22]. Interestingly, pleural effusion was rare and no tree-in-bud pattern or cavitation was found in pneumonia patients infected by the three kinds of coronaviruses. In addition, we found that only one case of COVID-19 (1.6%) presented as consolidation without GGO. Compared with the large amount of consolidation that appears in the early stage of SARS, we speculate that the pathogenicity of SARS-CoV-2 may be less than that of SARS-CoV [23]. Thus, it is necessary to fully understand and discriminate the CT features of COVID-19 at an early stage, which is helpful for the timely isolation and respiratory care of patients and early implementation of infection prevention measures.