New Delhi: Doctors in some hospitals in the country have been taking note of a new trend in which the coronavirus is presenting itself. More and more COVID-19 patients are coming in with complaints of diarrhoea and vomiting.
The worry is that potential COVID-19 patients are unsuspecting of this symptom and this can lead to delay in treatment.
The United State’s Centre for Disease Control (CDC) has also added three new conditions to the growing list of symptoms of COVID-19.
These are:
- Congestion or runny nose
- Nausea or vomiting
- Diarrhoea
With this, the total number of symptoms of the infectious COVID-19 disease stands at 12. The existing ones are:
- Chills
- Muscle pain
- Headache
- Sore throat
- Loss of smell and taste
- Shortness of breath or difficulty in breathing
In India, the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) has listed the following symptoms:
- Muscle pain
- Mucous formation in the throat
- Clogged nasal cavity
- Sore throat
- Diarrhoea
- Loss of state, and smell
According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), the most common symptoms of the disease are fever, dry cough, and tiredness. The serious ones are difficulty in breathing or shortness of breath, chest pain or pressure, loss of speech, or movement. The less common symptoms of COVID-19 are aches, pains, sore throat, diarrhoea, conjunctivitis, headache, loss of smell or taste, a rash on the skin.
There are have been media reports from Hyderabad and Kolkata quoting doctors as saying that they are seeing new symptoms in COVID-19 patients, like severe diarrhoea, vomiting and headaches, which are delaying treatment.
“These cases are presented as caused due to food poisoning and seasonal change leading to stomach upset. But it is the virus which is attacking the gastro-intestinal track first instead of the lungs. It is presenting in the form of severe diarrhoea and vomiting leading to dehydration,” a doctor at Hyderabad’s Chest and King Koti hospitals was quoted as telling Deccan Chronicle.
The virus is changing its genomic structure according to the season and ensuring its survival and proliferation in the human body, the report said.
