Rather than mild, moderate, and severe, WHO uses the terms "non-severe" "severe" and "critical." It defines non-severe as "absence of signs of severe or critical disease." Critical disease covers individuals who have respiratory failure, septic shock and/or multiple organ dysfunction.įirst off, Karan urges that anyone with symptoms get tested to see if it's actually COVID-19 you have. To make matters more complicated, the World Health Organization updated its descriptors in November - and they're different than those used by NIH.
If you're using a device called a pulse oximeter to monitor your breathing, you should seek medical attention if the concentration of oxygen in your blood falls below 94%. Not exactly what you think of when you hear the word "mild."Īs for moderate, patients in that category would experience shortness of breath or difficulty breathing. My legs and arms ached, my fever crept up to 103 and every few hours of sleep would leave my sheets drenched in sweat." And soon enough, everything tasted like nothing.It was a miserable five days. "Fatigue had enveloped me like a weighted blanket.ext, a headache clamped down on the back of my skull. Shots - Health News I got a 'mild' breakthrough case. This is an important distinction because some patients can have very low oxygen levels without many other symptoms or could have bad symptoms such as high fever and a painful headache but have normal oxygen levels. Patients, meanwhile, think in terms of how horrible they might feel. "So when we move from mild to severe, we mean how easy or how difficult is it for you to breathe and maintain certain oxygen levels in your blood, and what treatments, if any, should we be using." "SARS-CoV-2 is a respiratory virus that causes COVID, and the designations refer largely to how well a patient's lungs are able to oxygenate and what treatment is necessary to keep the illness from progressing," says Stanford University infectious disease physician Dr. That's because doctors and patients have different concerns when assessing COVID.ĭoctors think in terms of how your lungs and other organs are doing and what treatments might be required. It turns out that question isn't so easy to answer. There's not yet enough data for a definitive answer.Īnd then there's the question of what exactly "mild," "moderate" and "severe" mean vis-a-vis COVID. Early studies suggest that many people could have asymptomatic or mild cases rather than severe, in part because many more people are now vaccinated or have had previous disease.
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