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People's early symptoms of COVID-19 vary by age and sex, according to a new study from King’s College London. During the first three days of their infection, the most common symptoms in the group studied included loss of smell, chest pain, persistent cough, abdominal pain, blisters on the feet, eye soreness and unusual muscle pain. But people over 60 years old were less likely to lose their sense of smell, and the symptom became entirely irrelevant in the over-80 age group. Those patients experienced diarrhea, sore throat and chest pain as their early symptoms most often. Fever was not an early sign among any of the participants of any age.
Men were more likely to report chills, tiredness and shortness of breath. Women more frequently reported chest pain, persistent cough and loss of smell. The lead author said, "It's important people know the earliest symptoms are wide-ranging and may look different for each member of a family or household. Testing guidance could be updated to enable cases to be picked up earlier, especially in the face of new variants which are highly transmissible." Although the study was done when Alpha variant was the predominant, which has since been replaced by Delta, findings suggest symptoms of Delta and other variants will also differ across population groups.
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