Although there are a wide variety of symptoms that COVID patients have reported experiencing, researchers have begun to find patterns. In fact, one new study has broken the order in which observable, objective COVID symptoms are likely to appear. If you are infected with a case that is not asymptomatic, you will probably experience fever, then cough and muscle aches, followed by nausea and / or vomiting, and then diarrhea.
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The disease caused by the coronavirus typically follows this path, according to the study published in the Frontier Public Health magazine on August 13th. First, a patient develops a fever, then symptoms of upper respiratory tract, and finally, symptoms of upper or lower gastrointestinal tract. The least likely pathway would, according to this study, be diarrhea first, then nausea and / or vomiting, followed by cough, and finally fever.
But the order often turns out to be the same, no matter where it starts. For example, if the first symptom of a COVID patient is diarrhea, then their other symptoms will follow as indicated above – i.e. diarrhea followed by fever, then cough and muscle pain, and finally, nausea and / or vomiting.
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The researchers note that distinguishing the probable sequence of coronavirus symptoms is important for distinguishing these cases from other respiratory diseases. Finally, both the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) advise you to ask your doctor about COVID-19 if you start to have a cough or fever – however, these are also two common symptoms of the flu.
“The importance of knowing the first symptoms is rooted in the need to stop the spread of COVID-19, a disease that is two to three times more contagious than the flu and results in outbreaks of clusters,” the study reads. . “There is an increased risk in COVID-19, so faster testing and social distance are important, especially when social distances and quarantine measures are relaxed.”
Fortunately for diagnostic purposes, researchers found that the order in which the new symptom of coronavirus appears differs from influenza and other coronavirus-based diseases, such as Middle Eastern respiratory syndrome (MERS) and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS). According to the study, the flu typically occurs with a cough, not a fever, like the coronavirus. Like the flu, MERS and SARS are similar to the coronavirus but differ in the order of diarrhea. in front of nausea and / or vomiting.
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Health insurer monitors body temperature of a young sick man with contactless digital infrared thermometer.
To more directly compare their COVID data with these other respiratory diseases, researchers also added sore throat, myalgia, and headache – all reported symptoms of those diseases – to their calculations in a different model. However, even when studying these symptoms in addition to the original four, they found that the pattern typically remains the same. Fever is usually the first symptom, followed by cough. And then, in the set of seven symptoms, neck pain, myalgia, and headache typically appear next to, but in no particular order. Then, like the original set, nausea and / or vomiting is the second to last symptom, followed by diarrhea, as the last. And for more on how COVID can affect your body, check out the 98 Long Lasting COVID Symptoms You Need to Know About.
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