Clinical Features of COVID-19 among Bangladeshi patients
Though the incubation period of SARS-CoV-2 was reported to be 2-10 days
according to WHO,[37] it demonstrated to infect people with a median
incubation period of 3 days [38]. The maximum latency was observed
up to 24 days which is longer compared to MERS (5 days) and seasonal flu
(2 days). This implies the necessity for longer periods of quarantine or
effective monitoring of persons potentially exposed to the pathogen
[39]. The disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 manifests with diverse
clinical characteristics ranging from asymptomatic patients to acute
pneumonia with multiorgan failure. After analyzing various symptoms, the
disease is now classified into four levels of severity [40]. Mild
patients only exhibit symptoms of viral infection in the upper
respiratory tract while moderate patients manifested with fever,
respiratory symptoms of cough and shortness of breath. Patients with
severe cases manifest with dyspnea, acute respiratory distress syndrome
(ARDS) and septic shock. Finally, patients who need ICU support are
considered as critical and show features such as respiratory arrest,
septic shock, and multiple organ impairment [41].
A study of 103 RT-PCR confirmed COVID-19 Bangladeshi patients
demonstrated that 74.76% were mild, 9.71% were moderate and 15.53%
were severely ill patients. The most predominant clinical features
include fever (78.6%), fatigue (68%) and cough, (44.7%) loss of
appetite (37.9%), shortness of breath (37.9%) and anosmia (35.0%)
[42]. Another study of 100 COVID-19 patients demonstrated symptoms
like rhinitis (13.0%), body ache (13%), headache (12.0%), sputum
(7.0%) abdominal pain (4.0%) hemoptysis (3.0%) [43]. A cohort
study of 201 patients showed that very few patients were manifested with
rare symptoms like burning body (1%), toothache (1%), itchiness
(0.5%), red-eye (0.5%), oral ulcer (0.5%), constipation (0.5%) and
4.5% were asymptomatic [44]. Hypertension (34.0%) was the most
prevalent comorbidities associated with the patients followed by
diabetes mellitus (21.4%). Ischemic heart disease (9.7%), chronic
kidney disease (7.8%) renal disease (8.0%), asthma/COPD (6.0%) were
also manifested in the patients [42].