Volume 25, Issue 112, June 2021

Happy hypoxia in COVID-19: The paradoxical killer

Saniya Khan¹, Dhruv Talwar^1♦, Sunil Kumar², Sourya Acharya³

¹Post Graduate Resident, Department of Medicine, Jawaharlal Nehru Medical College, Datta Meghe Institute of Medical Sciences and Research (Deemed to be university), Maharastra 442001, India
²Professor, Department of Medicine, Jawaharlal Nehru Medical College, Datta Meghe Institute of Medical Sciences and Research (Deemed to be university), Maharastra 442001, India
³Professor and HOD, Department of Medicine, Jawaharlal Nehru Medical College, Datta Meghe Institute of Medical Sciences and Research (Deemed to be university), Maharastra 442001, India

^♦Corresponding author
Post Graduate Resident, Department of Medicine, Jawaharlal Nehru Medical College, Datta Meghe Institute of Medical Sciences and Research (Deemed to be university), Maharastra 442001, India

ABSTRACT

Coronavirus Infectious Disease 2019 is an infectious disease with alarming international concern. It has led to a pandemic with profound mortality and morbidity increasing the stress of workload over healthcare all through the world. It presented with a broad spectrum of presentations ranging from a mild asymptomatic infection to acute respiratory distress syndrome. One of a major reason for mortality in COVID-19 is late presentation to the healthcare facility. Happy Hypoxia is a major reason for this late presentation as patient does not have any significant respiratory distress even at low oxygen saturations. Many of such cases only have mild to moderate disease and recover fully however in some cases critical patients with COVID-19 may require ICU admission with high case fatality rate. We report a case series of such patients who did not report to the hospital due to happy hypoxia but later turned out to have severe COVID-19 infection which turned out to be fatal.

Keywords: Coronavirus, COVID-19, happy hypoxia

Medical Science, 2021, 25(112), 1295-1300

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