Towards a COVID-19 symptom triad: The importance of symptom constellations in the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic

PLoS One. 2021 Nov 22;16(11):e0258649. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0258649. eCollection 2021.

Abstract

Pandemic scenarios like SARS-Cov-2 require rapid information aggregation. In the age of eHealth and data-driven medicine, publicly available symptom tracking tools offer efficient and scalable means of collecting and analyzing large amounts of data. As a result, information gains can be communicated to front-line providers. We have developed such an application in less than a month and reached more than 500 thousand users within 48 hours. The dataset contains information on basic epidemiological parameters, symptoms, risk factors and details on previous exposure to a COVID-19 patient. Exploratory Data Analysis revealed different symptoms reported by users with confirmed contacts vs. no confirmed contacts. The symptom combination of anosmia, cough and fatigue was the most important feature to differentiate the groups, while single symptoms such as anosmia, cough or fatigue alone were not sufficient. A linear regression model from the literature using the same symptom combination as features was applied on all data. Predictions matched the regional distribution of confirmed cases closely across Germany, while also indicating that the number of cases in northern federal states might be higher than officially reported. In conclusion, we report that symptom combinations anosmia, fatigue and cough are most likely to indicate an acute SARS-CoV-2 infection.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Adult
  • Aged
  • Anosmia / epidemiology*
  • COVID-19 / diagnosis*
  • COVID-19 / epidemiology
  • Cough / epidemiology*
  • Data Interpretation, Statistical
  • Datasets as Topic*
  • Fatigue / epidemiology*
  • Female
  • Humans
  • Male
  • Middle Aged

Grants and funding

This work has received financial support from the Münch Foundation. The funding source did not have any additional role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.