![]() ![]() She's one of the lead researchers on the COVID Symptom Tracker, an app-based project that has so far recruited 3 million people across the U.K. However, fatigue on its own is not very predictive of disease, because it is also frequently reported by people who don't test positive, says Claire Steves, a geriatrician and senior lecturer at King's College London. He added: "I would also include new-onset fatigue, out of proportion to what a patient would expect to be experiencing under whatever circumstances they are ," as a symptom. "And it is very reasonable to get people thinking, you know, maybe I should get tested." Given that we're no longer in the typical cold and flu season, if you're experiencing muscle pains and other flu-like symptoms, "we know that those can be associated with COVID-19," he says. "I think all of us who have had the winter cold or flu have had experience with muscle pain, headache, sore throat," notes Aronoff. ![]() But that's hardly unique to this disease: Lots of viral infections can cause muscle aches and pains, which can result from an inflammatory response to a virus. Muscle pain: Nearly 15% of COVID-19 patients experience muscle pain, according to a report published by the World Health Organization in February that analyzed nearly 56,000 confirmed cases in China. Sometimes, those chills can be accompanied by shaking, since shivering is our bodies' way of generating heat and raising our temperature, he says. Shortness of breath: Stavropoulou's review found that this symptom occurs more frequently in severe cases "and indeed, in some studies, was a marker of severe disease." The two largest studies she looked at found that shortness of breath occurred in fewer than 8% of milder cases.Ĭhills/repeated shaking with chills: The chills generally precede a fever, though people don't always perceive when their temperature has spiked, Aronoff says. Given this fact, "if someone has a new cough or a new shortness of breath that's cropped up in the last three days or so, they should definitely get tested." That said, cough remains a "very, very common symptom of the pneumonia that the virus can cause," says Aronoff. "So while we think it's a main symptom, it appears only two out of three times for patients with COVID-19." Stavropoulou's systematic review of the medical literature found that fever was reported in 82% to 87% of mild to moderate cases.ĭry cough: Cough was the second most common symptom after fever, though "coughing was not always there," Stavropoulou notes. So how do you know when a symptom is cause to seek medical advice or testing? We asked doctors and public health and infectious disease researchers for their insights. Others, like headaches, chills or sore throat, are common to lots of illnesses. Some of these symptoms, such as loss of smell or taste, are highly distinctive and a strong indicator of infection. "So it's a bit of a bigger picture," says Charitini Stavropoulou, an associate professor in health services research at City, University of London in the U.K., who led an analysis of known symptoms in milder cases as part of a collaboration with Oxford University. We're getting a "better understanding of how these symptoms express in the general population and not necessarily in hospitalized patients," which is whom most of the earlier studies from China looked at. But as the virus has spread across the globe, researchers have developed a more nuanced picture of how symptoms of infection can manifest themselves, especially in milder cases. When the coronavirus pandemic first emerged, public health officials told the world to watch out for its telltale symptoms: fever, dry cough and shortness of breath. Fever, cough and shortness of breath were early on identified as symptoms of COVID-19, but additional symptoms are emerging.
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