Abstract:
The world is currently facing a dramatic disruption of everyday life owing to rapid progression of COVI-19 pandemic. As the pandemic evolves there is an urgent need to understand its epidemiology and its impact on the society to advert its mortality rate. Silent hypoxia has shown to be one of the major reasons of high death rates of people suffering from COVID-19 especially in third world countries. Measurement of oxygen saturation has been proposed to assess hypoxia in suspected COVID-19 infected patients. Clinicians have noted that patients with suspected COVID-19 and relatively normal oxygen saturation may desaturate after exertion, but the clinical importance of this finding is uncertain. In this research we aim to determine the-clinical importance of oxygen desaturation in the patients suffering from COVID-19 and the effect of rapid exercise test on COVID-19 patients in order to identify the disease before actual symptoms appear using an oximeter especially in third world countries where people cannot afford advance technologies and had suffered highest death rates due to COVID-19.This study aims to provide a reliable methodological guidance and evidence of silent hypoxia present in COVID-19 patiennts and method to detect the disesase at an early stage. Due to extreme load on hospitals ,there is an urgent need to detect the disease at an early stage using oximeter in order to reduce the load on hospitals.One minute sit-stand test has been used to assess the effect of rapid exercise on oxygen saturation of three sets of individuals(COVID-19 patients,healthy individuals and individuals with comorbidities), one-way ANOVA test was conducted to assess the difference in oxygen saturation of the subjects before and after exercise and it has been observed that COVID-19 patients showed significant decrease in their oxygen saturation levels before and after exercise with p value ( p ≤ 0.05) where as the results of healthy individual and people with comorbidities showed no significance(p=0.312, p=0.36). Results confirmed that oxygen saturation levels of COVID-19 patients have decreased after one-minute exercise test. Therefore,These findings may help to detect the disease at an early stage without the use of costly diagnostic tests and can prevent the disease from getting worse which will ultimately save many lives.
