QtM Thank you! (And before this gets reported to a mod, I wasn’t seeking medical advice, I really was just trying to understand what seemed to me to be a physiological contradiction.)
This is probably a stupid question, but these aren’t averaged, are they? Take someone like me, for example, 46 weeks of the year I probably average less than one episode a month. The other few weeks of the year (early summer and with winter chest colds), however, I have shortness of breath daily. That’s still just “intermittent,” isn’t it?
While you’re having the worse symptoms, your asthma would be classified as moderate. Once it’s calmed down (due to treatment or the virus running its course) you’d be classified as mild intermittent again. When your classification ‘steps up’ to another level, your treatment should ‘step up’ to that level also. When your classification steps down, stepping down your treatment should be considered also.
And remember, people with mild intermittent asthma can still die from an asthma attack. That’s why it’s important to treat based on the current clinical situation, not the average. On average, a person can be mild intermittent over the course of a year. But that matters little if clinically they’re dead from one of their infrequent attacks.