If you experience these 2 symptoms before anything else, it’s COVID-19
Vaccinations are about to start in the US now that the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine has received emergency use authorization, but it will take plenty of time for vaccines to make an impact. The drugs can help authorities get the pandemic under control and allow people to return to normal life, but only if at least 70% of the population gets immunized. Until then, most people will still risk infection, especially in the winter months as the virus continues to spread out of control. The US broke all records in the past few days: 231,000 daily cases, 3,300 deaths in a single day, and more than 108,000 concurrent hospitalizations are the new highs of the winter wave.
Health officials worry that more people will be exposed to the virus as they travel for the holidays, and many others will be infected. A large portion will be asymptomatic, and those who do develop symptoms are usually contagious a few days before the signs of the illness are present. The only way to diagnose COVID-19 confidently is a PCR test. But there is an early warning that you might have COVID-19, and a new study reaffirms a particular combination of symptoms that are an almost certain indication that you have COVID-19.
From the early days of the pandemic, doctors noticed that COVID-19 patients would complain about experiencing a sudden loss of smell (anosmia) and taste (ageusia). Several studies have explained why that happens, and the two symptoms are listed everywhere in guidelines. People have heard by now that COV
The study looked at 93 patients with an average age of 63 who were admitted to the non-intensive COVID-19 unit in March. They tested positive via a PCR test or showed signs of lung issues indicative of COVID-19. Of those, 58 said they experienced the loss of smell and taste, and 13 of the 58 said those were their first symptoms. The average duration of anosmia and ageusia was 25 to 30 days.
“Loss of smell and taste are common in people who have COVID-19 infections, and our study found that these symptoms often occur before other symptoms, like fever or shortness of breath,” Santa Maria della Misericordia University Hospital’s Dr. Francesco Bax. “Because of that, clinicians should consider a patient’s loss of smell and taste an early indication of infection, one that is monitored closely while keeping that patient isolated and possibly quarantined, until a definitive diagnosis can be made. While many people show evidence of COVID-19 infection in the lungs, we found there could be more at play than what a person’s lungs can tell us.”
The researchers also looked at blood work for the patients and think they’ve found a correlation between the loss of smell and taste and other issues. Specifically, they found that coronavirus patients who lost their senses of smell and taste had lower amounts of white blood cells (leukocytes), especially a subset called neutrophils.
ID-19 can induce the sudden loss of smell and taste, and there’s now more evidence to support the idea that anosmia and ageusia are often the very first signs of COVID-19.
In Italy, doctors observed that two-thirds of the patients admitted to a hospital in March experienced the loss of smell and taste, the American Academy of Neurology announced in a press release. But what’s more interesting is that 22% of those who experienced these two symptoms said they presented before any other symptoms.
This isn’t the first time researchers have looked at blood tests to find markers that might indicate a COVID-19 infection, but it’s the first time they’ve associated one particular change with the sudden loss of smell and taste.
“More research is needed to determine whether this decrease in white blood cells we observed can be used to help identify patients in the early stages of COVID-19 infection,” Bax said. “For people whose first symptoms were loss of taste and smell, we found very few had nasal congestion, so we think obstruction of the nasal passages is an unlikely cause of these symptoms. However, the association between a blood cell imbalance and losing your sense of smell may help in identifying patients at risk.”