I'm Franz Wiesbauer I'm an internist, trained in epidemiology and public health

at Johns Hopkins and the founder of Medmastery, where we teach important

clinical skills to doctors and other healthcare providers around the world.

Today we're going to talk about the symptoms associated with COVID-19.

They're quite a bit different from a regular cold.

Let's see how.

The disease seems to start with a fever followed by a dry cough.

Around 80% of confirmed cases are mild and can stay home, whereas 20% are more severe

and need inpatient care due to the pneumonia and its consequences caused by

the virus.

What's interesting is that COVID-19 only rarely seems to cause a runny nose,

sneezing or even a sore throat, even though the sore throat seems to be a

little more common.

These symptoms commonly observed in regular colds have been observed in only

about 5% of COVID-19 patients.

A paper published by Chen and coworkers in the respected journal, the Lancet

- describe the clinical course of 99 cases hospitalized for SARS-CoV-2 associated

pneumonia.

They found that fever and cough, are the most common symptoms of COVID-19 followed

by shortness of breath.

So the classical symptoms of pneumonia seem to be dominant in these patients.

17% of patients in their study treated for COVID-19 developed acute respiratory

distress syndrome, or ARDS, a severe complication of COVID-19 and other

pathogens and had to be mechanically ventilated.

3% received extracorporeal membrane oxygenation or ECMO and 11% died from the

disease.

These numbers are comparable to those of other publications.

And remember, these are numbers from hospitalized patients not the general

COVID-19 population.

So that's it for now.

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