A novel coronavirus, named severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2), causes an acute respiratory infectious disease, which was recently found in humans, commonly known as COVID-19 [
1]. A novel coronavirus, named severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2), causes an acute respiratory infectious disease, which was recently found in humans, commonly known as COVID-19 [
1]. The World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19 to be a pandemic on March 12th, 2020 [
2]. As of July 4th, total cases of 11,053,488 infected patients globally, with 526,260 deaths, had been reported in 210 countries [
3]. The common symptoms of patients were fever, dry cough, fatigue and sore throat. The average incubation period of the disease was found to be 5–6 days [
1]. The current gold standard reference for the diagnosis of COVID-19 infection is a real-time reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) method applied to upper respiratory tract secretions [
4]. However, the sensitivity of RT-PCR from swab samples was reported to be about 30% to 70% at the initial presentation [
5‐
7]. Hence, many patients with COVID-19 may not be identified at the initial presentation and pose a significant risk for infecting larger population given the highly contagious nature of the coronavirus. In addition, RT-PCR method does not allow assessing the disease severity. Alternatively, a chest CT scan is an imaging tool for diagnosing pneumonia and relatively easy to perform and provide rapid screening and diagnosis. Recent studies have shown that the CT imaging can demonstrate typical characteristic radiological findings such as multiple ground-glass opacities, patchy pulmonary consolidations and crazy-paving pattern, typically involving peripheral, sub-pleural and basal areas of the lung in COVID-19 patients [
5,
7,
8]. To this end, a chest CT scan may aid a faster diagnosis of COVID-19 and assess the severity of the disease. In this study, we evaluated the value of the chest CT scan compared to the reference standard real-time polymerase chain reaction in COVID-19 patients at initial presentation.