Signs and symptoms for diagnosing COVID-19 (search done on 15 July 2020)
Citation: Struyf T, Deeks JJ, Dinnes J, et al. Signs and symptoms to determine if a patient presenting in primary care or hospital outpatient settings has COVID‐19 disease. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews. 2021;(2):CD013665. Podcast available in EN / ES / MS / ZH.
What is this? When patients with suspected COVID-19 present to primary care or hospital outpatient settings, signs and symptoms might be used to determine if they have the disease.
In this updated Cochrane Rapid Review, the authors searched for studies that had evaluated the diagnostic accuracy of using signs and symptoms to determine if a person presenting in primary care or to a hospital outpatient setting has COVID‐19. They did not restrict their searches by language of publication and did the most recent search on 15 July 2020. They included 44 studies (26,884 participants), reporting data on 84 signs and symptoms.
What was found: At the time of this review, the included studies showed that most of the individual signs and symptoms that have been assessed appear to have very poor diagnostic properties. Based on the available data, neither absence nor presence of any specific sign or symptom is accurate enough to rule in or rule out COVID-19 disease.
However, loss of the sense of smell (anosmia) or taste (ageusia) may be useful as a red flag for COVID‐19; and the presence of fever or cough, given their high sensitivities, may also be useful to identify people for further testing.