ENT RELATED SYMPTOMATOLOGY OF COVID-19 IN OUR INSTITUTION

Abstract

Objective: To investigate the symptoms of COVID-19 disease cases which according to published scientific literature mainly includes upper respiratory track symptoms.

Study Design: Case series study.

Place and Duration of Study: It was carried out at ENT department, Pakistan Naval Ship Shifa, Karachi, from Mar 2020 to Jun 2020.

Methodology: It was from March, 2020 to June, 2020. Patients included in study were above the age of 10 years who were able to give us the details about their symptoms, contact and recent travel history and cooperated for their nasopharyngeal swabs for COVID-19 RT PCR tests. Probability, convenient, sampling technique was used for our study. Frequencies of age, gender, clinical symptoms of patients were analyzed by using descriptive statistics of SPSS.

Results: This study included 231 patients with COVID -19 positive nasopharyngeal swabs for RT-PC, out of which 200 were males and 31 were females. Mean age is 38.23 ± 14.77 years. Among the airway symptoms, multiple symptoms like fever, cough, myalgia were seen in 84 cases (36.4%) and cough was found in 22 (9.5%) of patients. Fever with cough was seen in 21 (9.2%) of patients. 58 (25.1%) cases were asymptomatic and were carriers. History of contact was positive in 122 (52.8%) of cases.

Conclusion: COVID patients have fever, cough and myalgia as the most common symptoms and such patients should be assessed with care and as per the standard guidelines of institutions.