Study of ICU patients finds ‘no one symptom’ specific to COVID-19

In addition to a cough and shortness of breath, fever has been one of the commonly reported symptoms associated with COVID-19.

In a recent UW Medicine study of patients in the intensive care unit (ICU) in the early days of the pandemic in the Puget Sound area, researchers found only half of the patients admitted to the hospital  initially had a fever.

Dr. Pavan Bhatraju, a pulmonary and critical care physician with the UW School of Medicine, is the lead author of this study.

Bhatraju said he was surprised to find that in the cases studied, only half of the patients had a fever upon hospital admission, though they may have developed a fever later.

“It really hits home to the idea that there’s no one symptom that’s very specific for COVID-19, and patients can present very different, so we need to have a high index of suspicion when we’re considering COVID-19,” Bhatraju said.

This, Bhatraju believed, is important in the discussion of expanded testing.

“I think being able to expand testing will go a great way in understanding who are people who potentially have very minor symptoms but then could be infectious,” he said. “And how we can decrease the spread of the virus.”

Of all patients infected with COVID-19, only a small percentage need to be hospitalized, and even fewer (5 percent or lower by some reports) require treatment in the ICU.