The healthcare systems across the world are dealing with the coronavirus pandemic. India is currently battling the second wave of the novel coronavirus pandemic and the rising covid-19 cases are causing a lot of panics, untold damage among the people, and there are also frightening prospects of the disease that are being uncovered.
One of the major issues faced by this infection is the dangerous involvement of the lung causing a spectrum of illnesses from mild to lower respiratory tract infection to severe Adult Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS).
This condition leads to the clinical parameters to identify hypoxia at the early stage to get a higher level of care at the earliest. However, the presence of silent or latent hypoxia has made this task a challenge in the current pandemic.
“The 6-minute-walk-test is generally a cardiopulmonary exercise which is being recently used in Covid-19 infection to determine any hypoxia that cannot be seen with normal oximetry, so the patient generally walks for 6 minutes at a normal pace and we need to monitor the saturation levels that is the SPO2 as well as the heart rate, if the SPO2 or the saturation level decreases less than 94 that means that the patient is having hypoxia during physical exercise and maybe a first indicator that pneumonia is setting inside the lungs and we need to get more investigated, explained Dr. Avi Kumar – Consultant, Pulmonology, Fortis Escorts, Okhla, New Delhi
What is silent Hypoxia or Happy Hypoxia?
Silent hypoxia is a situation when a pulse oximetry check on a patient who does not seem to be short of breath but the results on oximetry finding shows lower than a physician would expect.
Hence, this occurs in various situations, but most recently it has made headlines because of the huge number of incidences that is happening among individuals diagnosed with COVID-19.
However, the term silent comes from the fact that the patient does not appear to be short of breath. They do not have an increase in their respiratory rate, they are not gasping and they are not complaining of feeling air hunger or looking uncomfortable.
We become short of breath because of reasons like both the low oxygen level, as well as a high carbon dioxide level. Strangely, some coronavirus patients do not appear to have short of breath as the carbon dioxide level may still be normal in these individuals. Hence, it is not showing any distress even though the patient’s blood oxygen saturation may be dropping.