The Many Symptoms of Covid-19

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Wed, 2020-08-12 16:24 — mike kraft

For a Texas nurse, the first sign that something was wrong happened while brushing her teeth — she couldn’t taste her toothpaste. For a Georgia attorney, it was hitting a wall of fatigue on a normally easy run. When a Wisconsin professor fell ill in June, he thought a bad meal had upset his stomach.

But eventually, all of these people discovered that their manifold symptoms were all signs of Covid-19. Some of the common symptoms — a dry cough, a headache — can start so mildly they are at first mistaken for allergies or a cold. In other cases, the symptoms are so unusual — strange leg pain, a rash or dizziness — that patients and even their doctors don’t think Covid-19 could be the culprit.

With more than 18 million cases of coronavirus worldwide, one thing is clear: The symptoms are varied and strange, they can be mild or debilitating, and the disease can progress, from head to toe, in unpredictable ways.

Despite hundreds of published studies on Covid-19 symptoms, just how common any given symptom is depends on the patient group studied. Patients in hospitals typically have more severe symptoms. Older patients are more likely to have cognitive problems. Younger patients are more likely to have mild disease and odd rashes.

“The problem is that it depends on who you are and how healthy you are,” said Dr. Mark A. Perazella, a kidney specialist and professor of medicine at Yale School of Medicine. “It’s so heterogeneous, it’s hard to say. If you’re healthy, most likely you’ll get fever, achiness, nasal symptoms, dry cough and you’ll feel crappy. But there are going to be the oddballs that are challenging and come in with some symptoms and nothing else, and you don’t suspect Covid.”...

Even a symptom as common as fever can be tricky when trying to predict if a patient might have Covid-19. Although many businesses are doing fever checks to screen for Covid-19, many Covid-19 patients never have a fever. In a European study of 2,000 Covid-19 patients with mild to moderate illness, 60 percent never had a fever. In the University at Buffalo study, fewer than one in three patients with fever also tested positive for Covid-19....

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