USC researchers have found what appears to be the likely order in which COVID-19 symptoms first appear: fever, cough and muscle pain, then nausea and/or vomiting, then diarrhea.
CNN)With so much information available about the severity of the coronavirus and the need to follow guidelines, some people still refuse to accept reality.
For a Texas nurse, the first sign that something was wrong happened while brushing her teeth — she couldn’t taste her toothpaste. For a Georgia attorney, it was hitting a wall of fatigue on a normally easy run. When a Wisconsin professor fell ill in June, he thought a bad meal had upset his stomach.
But eventually, all of these people discovered that their manifold symptoms were all signs of Covid-19. Some of the common symptoms — a dry cough, a headache — can start so mildly they are at first mistaken for allergies or a cold. In other cases, the symptoms are so unusual — strange leg pain, a rash or dizziness — that patients and even their doctors don’t think Covid-19 could be the culprit.
For a spiky sphere just 120 nanometers wide, the coronavirus can be a remarkably cosmopolitan traveler.
Spewed from the nose or mouth, it can rocket across a room and splatter onto surfaces; it can waft into poorly ventilated spaces and linger in the air for hours. At its most intrepid, the virus can spread from a single individual to dozens of others, perhaps even a hundred or more at once, proliferating through packed crowds in what is called a superspreading event.
Of all the coronavirus’s qualities, perhaps the most surprising has been that seemingly healthy people can spread it to others. This trait has made the virus difficult to contain, and continues to challenge efforts to identify and isolate infected people.
Since April, the Trump administration has funneled $48 million into a program with the Mayo Clinic, allowing more than 53,000 Covid-19 patients to get plasma infusions. Doctors and hospitals desperate to save the sickest patients have been eager to try a therapy that is safe and might work. Tens of thousands more people are now enrolled to get the treatment that’s been trumpeted by everyone from the president to the actor Dwayne Johnson, better known as The Rock.
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