Early symptoms indicating a Covid-19 infection varies between age groups and also between men and women, new UK research has found. The study, which was published in The Lancet Digital Health’ journal on Thursday, was carried out by researchers at King’s College in London using data from the self-reported ZOE Covid Symptom Study app.
They studied 19 symptoms, including the most common ones such as a persistent cough and loss of smell, as well as abdominal pain and blisters on the feet. We aimed to estimate the probability of an individual being infected with SARS-CoV-2 (Covid-19) on the basis of early self-reported symptoms to enable timely self-isolation and urgent testing, the researchers note.
Model performance to predict Covid-19 positivity was compared in terms of sensitivity, specificity, and area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) in the test set, they said. As per their findings, in people aged over 60, loss of smell was not significant and it was not at…