It's time we/they acknowledged more symptoms

[Catyness]

I've been really frustrated by this for ages. The WHO lists a whole range of symptoms for covid. Everyone I know who has had it didn't start their illness with fever, cough, loss of taste and smell, they started with headaches, body aches, runny nose, sore throat, fatigue or upset stomachs and then went on to develop characteristic symptoms.

Ignoring these other symptoms means people are not isolating and so spreading the virus in the first days of their illness. And that's not even touching on how children may well not even develop any of the 3 acknowledged symptoms at any point.

Now there are more tests available, surely it's time to start testing when people become unwell with a wider range of symptoms. I'd think this would be more effective than blanket testing populations to pick up the few asymptomatic.

How do people realise they've lost their sense of smell? Ive had a couple of colds, feeling dreadful, when Ive lost my sense of smell, but i hadnt realised until a smell was pointed out. For example i was covered in vapour rub and complained to my husband it must have gone out of date because it has lost its smell. My husband not so kindly pointed out that actually he could very much smell it.

@OverTheRainbow88

Our school has listed lots of other symptoms and said not to come in with those, such as a tummy upset. Lots of kids have tested positive here without a temp or cough but tummy upset and sore throat!

I had two year 7’s crying in class yesterday over stomach pain.

And many year 11’s with no symptoms, only getting tested (positive) because their parents are getting ill, but they are clearly passing it on to each other.

With the information from the zoe app the government should be able to develop an app which lets people put in a whole spectrum of potential symptoms together with their age and it works out their probability of having covid and uses that to determine testing priority and whether isolation is necessary.

The zoe app has shown that symptoms vary widely by age and the types of initial symptoms can even be used to determine the likelihood of severe covid and long covid.

Professor Tim Spector, of King’s College London, said “We need to start telling people what are the key symptoms at different ages rather than the blanket obsession with fever, cough and lack of smell.” In the King’s College study of the children diagnosed with Covid-19 who had symptoms, 55% had fatigue, 54% had a headache, and almost half had a fever. Sore throats were present in around 38% of the children, 35% skipped meals, 15% had an unusual skin rash and 13% had diarrhoea. Around half did not have any of the main symptoms listed by the NHS. Professor Spector says teachers and parents should be aware of these symptoms and students should stay off school with them. Some of the symptoms overlap with those for colds. The Queen’s University Belfast team have also studied the impact of the virus on children and found that diarrhoea, vomiting and abdominal cramps in children could be a sign of coronavirus. Both these studies found that children were not badly affected by the virus. An evidence summary of paediatric Covid-19 literature conducted in April 2020 by Munro, Boast and Goldstein found that “Children’s symptoms vary slightly from those seen in adults and tend to be milder. Cough or fever are observed in only around half of symptomatic children, less often than in adults. In contrast, upper respiratory symptoms such as a runny nose or sore throat occur in 30-40% and diarrhoea and/or vomiting are found in around 10% (sometimes this is the only symptom), more often than in adults.”

The World Health Organisation lists a wide range of symptoms and many other countries test for a wider range of symptoms than the UK does. These symptoms include fever, dry cough, tiredness, aches and pains, sore throat, diarrhoea, conjunctivitis, headache, loss of taste or smell, a rash on skin or discolouration of fingers or toes.