COVID-19 Symptoms Can Be Mild and Dangerous

I watched a video made by an older couple, passengers on the diamond princess. Hopefully, this helps elucidate the mismatch that can happen between medical practice and reality. Medical doctors are merely experts at the practice of medicine, but if that practice fails the situation, medical doctors often lack the depth of training and experience to know what to do otherwise.

Often, the best a doctor can do is express confidence in medical practice and protocols, and otherwise, detach him or herself in the hope you fall into the statistics of a good prognosis. If you’re lucky you have a doctor that is paying close attention, isn’t too limited by functional fixedness, and is adept at researching using Medline and other medical databases. Or they are quick to consult more experienced colleagues who are more capable to handle the outlying cases.

The passenger couple (mostly the man) described in detail exactly how their symptoms went and how they felt. He started out mentioning that all passengers were confined to quarters.

Through the course of a little less than a week, the worse symptoms they had were a mild occasional cough, a tickle as he described it, and occasional mild spikes in temperature. Protocol required they tell the medical crew if their temperature went over a certain value. They never did because one spike went over the threshold (barely) and went down after he showered, never to return. They checked their temperatures every hour.

Overall, they felt about how they’d feel when they get a cold. Fortunately, medical staff stopped by about four days after the beginning of isolation to administer the coronavirus test because they were listed as high risk (he was a diabetic).

When the test results came back positive a few days later, they were told they will take a trip to the hospital, which was a 6-hour journey. As they were leaving their cabin merely pulling a suitcase on wheels down the level hallway, the man found he was short of breath.

He didn't notice any problem breathing before that, likely because he was confined to his cabin. His shortness of breath progressed rapidly after that. They determined pretty quickly he was approaching critical and may not survive the 6-hour trip, so they sent him to a closer hospital only 90 minutes away.

Risking cliché overuse, the moral of this post is that with normal medicine every person’s body is different in ways medicine doesn't always understand. Medicine is usually confined to how we are the same. So we may sometimes need to get a second opinion and/or seek our own answers. Granted, the paradigm and skills I acquired in graduate and doctoral studies help me know how to vet what I find. But the most important skill is critical thinking, which anyone can learn how to apply.

In this pandemic, the uncertainty about the details of the virus and how it impacts different individuals and populations, make this situation a bad bedfellow with medical paternalism. It is different enough from previous coronaviruses and the flu that the details may be important.

The medical advice has been simple and based on existing protocols. But this virus is indeed novel and being informed helps each of us determine the best things to do - even if medical advice doesn’t advocate it or discourages it.