Dr. Christopher Peterson
You're doing all
you can to keep coronavirus at bay. That is; you are staying indoors,
maintaining social distance, regularly washing hands and disinfecting
objects you
touch the most, including your mobile phones. That is quite
an effort!
Because you're now spending most of your time indoors, there are few things you need to do right.
One of the key
things is to keep feeding yourself right information, paying close
attention to symptoms and knowing what steps to take to manage them.
How long before symptoms start?
This is what we
medically call, incubation. The incubation period of an infection is the
time between being exposed to it and developing symptoms. It is not
always possible to know when people were first infected, especially when
it comes to novel coronavirus.
There seems to be significant variation in the length of time it takes people to develop symptoms.
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Some countries only
test (and confirm) coronavirus in people with severe infection, and
it's not known if the incubation period for people with
critical/severe/moderate/mild infection is different.
It's believed that many people do not develop symptoms (they are asymptomatic), so there are no symptoms to count back from.
However, according
to the information from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
(CDC), the median incubation period of Covid-19 (the middle number of
days between maximum and minimum, and usually the most likely number in a
'bell-shaped curve') is 5.1 days. 97.5 per cent of people who develop
symptoms will have got them within 11.5 days.
Symptoms and managing them
When it comes to
initial symptoms, however, the World Health Organization report based on
56,000 confirmed cases revealed the most common symptoms to be: fever
(88 per cent), dry cough (68 per cent), tiredness (38 per cent),
shortness of breath (19 per cent), aching muscles or joints (15 per
cent), sore throat (14 per cent), headache (14 per cent) and blocked
nose (5 per cent).
There does not
appear to be any particular pattern in the order of symptom development.
Some people will start with a cough; others will develop fever, with
cough arriving only a few days later.
If you have mild
disease, fever is likely to settle within a few days and you are likely
to feel significantly better after a week.
You may continue
coughing for a couple of days - while you should be very careful to
maintain social distancing, as everyone should, you don't need to stay
in isolation just because your cough has not completely resolved. If
you're well in other respects, your likelihood of infecting others at
this stage is low.
In people with more severe infection, shortness of breath is likely to become more marked 7-10 days after they develop symptoms.
This occurs because
the infection takes hold deep in your lungs, leading to inflammation
which prevents efficient transfer of oxygen from your lungs to your
bloodstream. Symptoms can develop rapidly (in hours) and worsen in
minutes that's when you will need urgent medical attention and not keep
staying at home anymore. Especially if:
- You are too breathless to speak more than a few words.
- Your breathing has become harder and faster in the last hour, even when you are not doing anything.
- You are feeling so ill that you have stopped doing everything you normally do.
- You have suddenly become confused (this can be a symptom of lack of oxygen to the brain).
And please keep in
mind that being infected by coronavirus is not a death sentence. It's
important to remember that you are much more likely to recover than to
die.
The author is a medical doctor based in Dar es salaam
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