Just thought I would share this article I read today. I have had a look and seem to be quite a few easily available online.
Has anyone used one / wondered if might be helpful to share experiences or any issues. Thanks.
In the Times today, www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/coronavirus-finger-clip-device-gives-warning-on-oxygen-level-v35qkzz0p
*Coronavirus: Finger-clip device gives warning on oxygen level
A simple device that monitors oxygen levels at home could help to identify people who are falling severely ill with Covid-19, doctors have said.
Experts are concerned that significant numbers are not receiving care quickly enough, which leads to a hard-to-detect form of viral pneumonia.
Richard Levitan, an American doctor, said that the volume of patients who need a ventilator could be reduced if people with symptoms such as fever and cough monitored themselves using pulse oximeters. These are small devices that clip on a finger to measure oxygen levels in the blood.
“We are just beginning to recognise that Covid pneumonia initially causes a form of oxygen deprivation we call ‘silent hypoxia’ — ‘silent’ because of its insidious, hard-to-detect nature,” he wrote in The New York Times.
Pulse oximeters, which can be bought for £23, had helped to save two of his friends, he added. Detection of low oxygen levels, early treatment and close monitoring also appeared to have helped Boris Johnson.
British experts agreed that pulse oximeters could provide a valuable early warning but said that the NHS would have to be geared up to respond.
Professor Babak Javid, consultant in infectious diseases at Cambridge University Hospitals, said: “Many of the features of Covid are strikingly reminiscent of other lung infections that interfere with the ability of the lungs to oxygenate the blood. However, in some people that may be previously fit and well, this may not be apparent.”
He cautioned that pulse oximeters might not pick up warning signs when patients had been resting. “In a number of patients, it may be that mild exercise, such as walking for a few minutes, would push up their oxygen demands so much that the lungs can no longer cope, and their blood oxygen saturation dramatically falls,” he said.
“These patients are likely to be at risk of becoming severely unwell in a few hours, or a day or two, but if this ‘post-exercise saturation’ test is not performed, they may be falsely reassured that they are not seriously unwell.”
Whether a patient is admitted into hospital depends on several factors, including their age, frailty, underlying health conditions and their condition, which would include oxygen levels.
Andrew Farmery, professor of anaesthetics at the Nuffield department of clinical neurosciences at the University of Oxford, said that the viral pneumonia caused by Covid-19 appeared to be unique. “Many have commented that phenotypically it’s more like altitude sickness than pneumonia, with patients hypoxic and breathless without significant pneumonic inflammation,” he said.
Dr Levitan described how he spent ten days in New York’s Bellevue Hospital, where he helped to insert breathing tubes into Covid-19 patients. He was surprised to see that patients admitted for other reasons and who did not realise they had Covid-19 were showing signs of pneumonia, where the lungs become inflamed and fill with fluid*