Some coronavirus guidelines

An excerpt from a story in The Guardian online today:

Early guidelines from the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice) suggest the following symptoms may help a doctor to decide whether a patient with Covid-19 should go to hospital:

• Severe shortness of breath at rest or difficulty breathing.
• Coughing up blood.
• Blue lips or face.
• Feeling cold and clammy with pale or mottled skin.
• Collapse or fainting (syncope).
• New confusion.
• Becoming difficult to rouse.
• Little or no urine output.

In the first week, people who are fit and healthy, with a robust immune system, will usually fight off the virus. But the problems come for some people in the second week, when their immune system overreacts to the virus and ends up attacking the body’s own organs. That is why the most seriously ill can end up on life support machines with organ failure.

Chinese data showed that 20% of patients went to hospital. Some 15% had severe disease, which involved breathing difficulties and hypoxia, where some of the tissues of the body are not getting an adequate oxygen supply. That can manifest in anxiety, confusion and restlessness.

Only 5% ended up in critical care, with such severe illness that they needed organ support. Ventilators can take over the patient’s breathing, to allow the lungs time to recover. But patients could also need support for their heart, liver and kidneys – although many of those needing that sort of mechanical help have underlying conditions which make them particularly vulnerable.