The Ministry of Health and Family Welfare on Saturday revised its clinical management protocol for COVID-19 patients in the country.
It has added new symptoms of coronavirus in a document published for use by health professionals as a reference.
” Loss of smell (anosmia) or loss of taste (ageusia)” has been added to a list of nine other symptoms in the document “Clinical Management Protocol: COVID-19”.
The other symptoms include fever, cough, fatigue, shortness of breath, expectoration, myalgia, rhinorrhea, sore throat and diarrhea.
“Older people and immune-suppressed patients in particular may present with atypical symptoms such as fatigue, reduced alertness, reduced mobility, diarrhoea, loss of appetite, delirium, and absence of fever. Children might not have reported fever or cough as frequently as adults.,” it said.
“As per data from Integrated Health Information Platform (IHIP)/ Integrated Disease Surveillance Programme (IDSP) portal case investigation forms for COVID 19 (n=15,366), the details on the signs and symptoms reported are (as on 11.06.2020), fever (27%), cough (21%), sore throat (10%), breathlessness (8%), Weakness (7%), running nose (3%) and others 24%,” it added.
The Ministry said people above 60 years are particularly vulnerable to the coronavirus. Those with underlying non-communicable diseases – diabetes, hypertension cardiac disease, chronic lung disease, cerebro-vascular disease, chronic kidney disease, immune-suppression and cancer – are among the high risk category.
India has so far registered 3,08,993 COVID-19 cases with 8,884 fatalities.
A total of 7,135 COVID-19 patients have been cured in the last 24 hours. Thus, so far, a total of 1,54,329 patients have been cured of COVID-19. The recovery rate is 49.95% amongst COVID-19 patients. Presently, there are 1,45,779 active cases and all are under active medical supervision, the Health Ministry said today.
