Alwan: What Exactly Is Mild Covid-19?—Noted
Nisreen Alwan: What Exactly Is Mild Covid-19? https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2020/07/28/nisreen-a-alwan-what-exactly-is-mild-covid-19/: ‘I went out for a 20 minute slow walk yesterday evening with my little girl...
... who was desperate to see the flowers on the way. My exercise capacity is still terrible, and I knew that by doing that I would pay the price the day after. Indeed, I woke up with the familiar chest heaviness and utter exhaustion which gets worse by sitting at my desk to work.
I struggle to find any precise case definition for “mild” covid-19, which is what I supposedly had and still have not fully recovered from. It seems common in many countries that anyone with symptoms, but not hospitalised is counted as a “mild” case.... A Dutch survey of more than 1,600 covid-19 patients, 91% of which were not hospitalised and 85% described their health as good before the infection, found that symptoms such as fatigue (88%), shortness of breath (75%), chest pressure (45%), headache (40%), muscle pain (36%) and palpitations (32%) last for months after initial infection. Nearly half of those surveyed said they were no longer able to exercise....
I strongly think we must now clearly define and measure “recovery” from covid-19. This way we can quantify non-death health outcomes and monitor long-term implications of the virus. The definition needs to be more sophisticated than just hospital discharge or testing negative.... I am advocating for precise case definitions for covid-19 morbidity that reflect the degree of severity of infection and allow us to measure moderate and long term health and wellbeing outcomes.... We still know very little about covid-19, but we do know that we cannot fight what we do not measure…
.#noted #2020-07-28
https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/article-alwan-mild-covid-19.pdf
