A fingertip Blood Oxygen % meter can predict up to 12 hours in advance who’s Covid disease is about to go severe.
While sitting down resting if the Oxygen meter reads 94% or more Then while walking at a normal pace the Oxygen meter drops to 90% or less, The Covid-19 severity is very likely to become high and need ICU support and supplemental Oxygen within 12 hours.
It can be helpful to assess blood oxygen levels in patients when they are walking if that level is normal when they are sitting, a new study suggests. A low level of oxygen in the blood, or hypoxia, contributes to shortness of breath and worsening illness in patients with Covid-19.
At 10 Chicago-area hospitals, doctors studied 531 Covid-19 patients whose blood oxygen levels were normal at rest. Roughly one in four developed hypoxia when they got up and walked.
These individuals were nearly five times more likely to eventually need basic oxygen support and nearly eight times more likely to need advanced oxygen therapy, compared to patients whose blood oxygen levels held steady while walking.
The drop in blood oxygen levels while walking could be detected an average of 12 hours before patients required extra oxygen, researchers found.
So-called ambulatory hypoxia "may serve as an early, non-invasive physiologic marker for the likelihood of developing moderate to severe disease and help clinicians triage patients and initiate earlier interventions," the researchers proposed in a paper posted on Thursday on medRxiv ahead of peer review
