Covid-19 Disease Treatment

Covid-19 Treatment

image credit by-Mongkolchon Akesin

Those people who do end up with Covid-19,

you could put them into 3 groups:

1) there is a minority who are asymptomatic which means they don't develop any symptoms at all,

2) And then a large group who do develop symptoms. In total, those two groups will make up about 80% of the total

3) And then there are the severe cases and that's about 20%. And those are the people who will end up in hospital.

Some of those, a small proportion, unfortunately and very sadly will die. If you have the symptoms of Covid-19 which as we all know now are a dry cough that's new but fairly persistent, a temperature and shortness of breath, the advice is to stay home and look after yourself so that means fluids and paracetamol to lower your temperature and generally not doing too much and trying to get better.

Our bodies are really good at fighting off infections and they do that all the time against viruses and bacteria. So what should happen during the course of a week is that your body should mount a good immune response which means the white blood cells will fight off the invading virus. For about 80% of cases, we expect those people will be able to get better at home and that will be the end of it for them. If your symptoms get worse over the course of that week or you still are running a temperature by the end of seven days, you really do need to seek medical help. The doctor will be looking for a range of possible symptoms which will suggest that you may need to go to the hospital. 

Now those include having a severe shortage of breath or difficulty breathing, coughing up blood, blue lips or face, feeling cold and clammy with pale or mottled skin, collapsing or fainting, new confusion, becoming difficult to rouse, so you feel very lethargic and really can't take much notice of what people are saying, and little or no urine output. A number of tests will be carried out in hospital.

The first thing that will happen is a diagnostic test to make sure that your symptoms really are Covid-19. These are the tests you've heard a lot about and they're in short supply. A blood test to ascertain how well your immune system is working. It's very important to know how the immune system is doing because there is a second phase of the disease for some people where the immune system actually goes into overdrive and produces something called a cytokine storm. That's where the immune system actually attacks the body itself and that can result in damage to organs such as the heart or the kidneys or the liver. 

Patients in hospital will be given ultrasound tests or CT scans in order to have a look at how the lungs are doing and that is to assess whether they have pneumonia and if so how bad it is. Some people will have oxygen delivered through a face mask but others where their lungs are really not coping very well, will have to go on a ventilator that will actually take over their breathing function and for that they must be sedated.

There will also be an electrocardiogram test to check that the heart is working normally. The heart is at risk from the coronavirus and the kidneys and the lungs also can suffer from lack of oxygen. Understanding the progression of coronavirus can actually seem a bit scary, particularly when we've heard about children and young people and fit people even actually suffering and dying from this but they are rare and in fact, there are anomalies at the other end of things too. So some quite elderly people and even people with cancer conditions have come through this and done fine. It's worth remembering that the vast majority of people are going to recover.