LOS ANGELES: Scientists have found the likely order in which Covid-19 symptoms first appear, an advance that may help clinicians rule out other diseases, and help patients seek care promptly or decide sooner to self-isolate.
According to the study, published in the journal Frontiers in Public Health, the likely order of symptoms in patients with Covid-19 is fever, followed by cough, muscle pain, and then nausea, and/or vomiting, and diarrhoea.
“This order is especially important to know when we have overlapping cycles of illnesses like the flu that coincide with infections of Covid-19,” explained study co-author Peter Kuhn, a professor of medicine and biomedical engineering at the University of Southern California (USC) in the US. With this new information, Kuhn said doctors can determine what steps to take to care for patients, and prevent their condition from worsening. The researchers believe identifying patients earlier may reduce hospitalisation time since there are better approaches to treatments now for Covid-19.
In the current study, the scientists predicted the order of symptoms from data on the rates of symptom incidence of over 55,000 coronavirus cases in China, all of which were collected from February 16 to 24 by the WHO.