Someone at one point wanted of the percentage of patients who had a given symptoms of coronavirus. It’s not very helpful, but in the Results section (of this NEJM article) a list of patient of symptoms who had mild or severe disease in Wuhan is given. A cough seems to be the most prominent thing, even fever doesn’t seem that useful.
Puts me at ease, because last week, I had the pukes one morning (No; I’m 50-freaking-3). Woke up with a migraine, which almost never happens-- I usually get them in the late afternoon or early evening, after an aura that sets in between noon and 2pm.
I get severe nausea with the afternoon-evening ones, but never actually throw up.
I took nausea medicine, and after 1/2 hr. of not puking, took migraine medicine, and about an hour and a cup of coffee later, was feeling almost like nothing had happened.
I chalked it up to stress, but a tiny corner of my mind has been wondering if those are ever symptoms of Covid-19. Google was unhelpful.
I was halfway between “Yay! Mild case! Now I’m immune!” and “OMG! I’ve exposed my family!”
Called my doctor and got a recorded message that my symptoms were nothing to be concerned about. :dubious: Called my cousin, the PCP, and he kind of laughed. Told him about the recorded message, and then he really laughed, and said “Wished I’d thought of that.” His office phones have been ringing, like, 3 times a minute with people wanting to know if their random symptoms mean they have Covid-19. “I woke up with a stiff neck. Do I have the corona virus?” Really.
So, he reassured me, and said yeah, probably stress, but couldn’t fill me in on what exactly is Covid-19.
I guess it’s like pornography: he can’t define it, but he knows it if he sees it.
The symptoms resulting from infection by the SARS-CoV-2 virus are so variable from patient to patient that is essentially impossible to diagnose the onset of COVID-19 with confidence unless a patient is experiencing profound respiratory distress (e.g. inflammation of the lungs with apparent consolidative pulmonary opacities from chest radiography). Many patients are marginally symptomatic as the NEJM paper indicates, and because there is no comprehensive testing to sample the entire population we can only guess at the proportion of asymptomatic carriers based upon how the virus has spread.
FWIW, a very rough dynamical system model I built a couple of weeks ago of the spread through the United States mainland using the data publicly available at the time from Johns Hopkins indicated a much higher percentage of carriers who are asymptomatic or with such mild symptoms that they don’t report, and depending on some assumptions of P2P transmissibility and residual presence in the environment had an R[SUB]0[/SUB] of at least 4 and potentially higher than 6, especially in dense urban areas where public transit is widely used. I haven’t bothered updating the model because the inexcusably limited amount of testing of even symptomatic patients make it pointless but i suspect post hoc antibody testing and analysis will reveal more than 80% of carriers were completely asymptomatic or had such mild symptoms that they were taken to be allergy or lack of rest. Which means that nearly everyone who contracts the virus is a “super spreader”.
There are, of course, the typical number of independent pathologies both infectious and otherwise, and stress-induced symptoms (which are just as real from an effect standpoint as infectious illness) so the best thing you can do for yourself and all of the at-risk people who have not yet been infected is follow the guidelines for public hygiene (social distancing, hand washing, disinfect door handles, railings, and other commonly touched surfaces) and encourage people with pronounced but not critical symptoms and those at risk to isolate and self-careto the extent possible.
Stranger