Senior scientists have called for the UK to expand its official list of Covid symptoms to reduce the number of missed cases and ensure more people know they should self-isolate.
The researchers, who include Prof Calum Semple, a member of the government’s Sage committee of experts, argue the UK’s narrow clinical definition of Covid leads to delays in identifying people with the disease and may miss them altogether, hampering efforts to disrupt the spread of the virus.
Writing in the British Medical Journal, Semple, of the University of Liverpool, along with Dr Alex Crozier at UCL and others describe how Covid patients do not always experience the official UK symptoms of a high fever, a new continuous cough, or a loss of sense of smell or taste early on, or at any time in the course of the disease.
“To reopen society with greater speed and fairness, control of transmission must improve,” they write. “This starts with an expanded and more context appropriate case definition and rests on adaptive, locally grounded, and information-led public health responses.”
While the UK lists only three symptoms for Covid, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lists 11 and the World Health Organization lists 13. The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control describe a range of symptoms associated with mild-to-moderate Covid-19, the most common being headache, weakness or tiredness, muscle aches, runny nose, appetite loss and sore throat.