iStockphoto / Canberk Sezer
Have you ever had dense brushes with the novel coronavirus? For anyone reading here who has already contracted the virus, this is not necessarily for you. I’m talking about people like myself who spent 6+ hours in very close proximity (a house) with someone who started showing symptoms and tested positive 48 hours later and I, in turn, that needed to be tested and a solid spent five days wondering if I could not breathe because of ‘shortness of breath’ or if it stuck the crippling stress ball in my chest that broke me down.
Sitting and waiting for symptoms to recur made for one of the most stressful weeks in recent memory and I estimate that tens of thousands of you out there who have read this have already experienced something similar. The good news is that if you read this, it means that you are still following the COVID-related news and are probably still taking precautionary measures to protect yourself against the virus.
A new study from the University of Southern California, recently published in the Frontiers of Public Health Journal, outlines what symptoms a person infected with the virus is most likely to be exposed to first. This is especially important for treatment and intervention purposes, but also to remove potentially overlapping symptoms with other diseases.
By studying the onset symptoms of COVID-19, SARS, and MERS that cause similar symptoms, they were able to distinguish a pattern. Here are what they found:
The first sign of the coronavirus is likely to appear as a fever in infected patients, followed by a cough and muscle ache, according to the study conducted by the University of Southern California published in the journal Frontiers of Public Health Thursday. People will then experience nausea like vomiting and diarrhea.
The initial symptoms of coronavirus are very similar to other respiratory diseases such as MERS and SARS, but it is the timing of problems with gastrointestinal problems that make COVID-19 easier to single out.
“The upper GI tract (i.e., nausea / vomiting) appears to be affected before the lower GI tract (i.e., diarrhea) in COVID-19, which is the opposite of MERS and SARS,” the scientists wrote in the study. (via NYPost)
It seems like it was just yesterday when gastrointestinal symptoms were completely ruled out as symptoms of COVID-19 and now this study has established it as one of the most likely symptoms of early.
Here is an excerpt from the study, which you can read in full here:
The most likely initial symptom is fever in the three studied diseases caused by coronaviruses (ie COVID-19, SARS, and MERS) and cough in flu. The most likely sequence of the four easily recognizable symptoms is identical in MERS and SARS, but the most likely pathway of COVID-19 has one key difference. The first two symptoms of COVID-19, SARS, and MERS are fever and cough. However, the upper GI tract (i.e., nausea / vomiting) appears to be affected before the lower GI tract (ie, diarrhea) in COVID-19, which is the opposite of MERS and SARS. In all diseases we found that fever and cough occur before nausea / vomiting and diarrhea. When observing the set of seven symptoms, including three subjective ones (i.e., sore throat, headache, and myalgia), we found that the initial symptoms of the most likely pathway are the same as in the most likely pathway of the four recognizable symptoms. . Also in both the implementation of four and seven symptoms, the symptoms of the GI tract are last. (fia)
I wish I could go back in time to January 2020 when the virus just started spreading all over the world and telling myself to invest heavily in companies that produce masks and thermometers. I have talked to friends and family who take their temperatures several times a day, even without symptoms and it has occurred to me every now and then that I have found myself without taking my own temperature.
This study analyzed more than 55,000 cases of coronavirus, which is a fairly robust dataset, but also quite small compared to the millions and millions of cases worldwide. For more of this you can click here to NYPost or read the study here in full.
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