After a fever, dry cough is one of the most common symptoms of COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. The disorder occurs in almost 70 percent of cases, with different frequency and forms, not always easy to define or to be traced back to a coronavirus infection. For this reason, and to deepen the knowledge on one of the main symptoms of COVID-19, for some months a group of researchers from the University of Cambridge (United Kingdom) has been collecting cough records of thousands of people, through an application which can be downloaded to your iPhone or Android smartphone.
COVID-19 cough
The indication of “dry cough” as a symptom of a disease is not very precise, and understandably leads those who have it to wondering whether or not it is caused by a coronavirus infection. Definitions provided by international health authorities and individual countries vary slightly, but still refer to a “recent” cough involving episodes that can last for more than an hour, during which coughing is frequent. Another indicator is the frequency of these episodes, if for example three or more in a day.
Colds and other ailments can cause a cough similar to that of COVID-19, but according to the information gathered so far on the symptoms of patients, the cough caused by the coronavirus is quite persistent, to the point of preventing people from speaking or keeping awake. night. It almost always occurs without a sore throat and is in any case accompanied by other symptoms, such as fever and difficulty in recognizing smells and tastes. Fatigue and headache are additional symptoms that could indicate a form of COVID-19.
Cough app
To try to understand something more, the Cambridge researchers have created COVID-19 Sounds, an application that is used to record and share the sound of your own cough. The records are collected by the leaders of the initiative, with the aim of creating algorithms that allow the automatic recognition of a cough caused by COVID-19, distinguishing it from that caused by other diseases.
Things to know about the coronavirus The Coronavirus Post newsletter updates you on the latest news: it's free and arrives every Thursday at 6pm. To receive it, write your email address here and press the button below. Having read the information, I agree to send the Newsletter The application shows a questionnaire to know the health conditions of those who use it, and whether or not they are affected by COVID-19. He then asks to indicate the symptoms and finally to register a few coughs. To assess breathing and changes in tone of voice, the app also asks you to record the reading aloud of a text. The data is stored for research purposes only and anonymously: those who do not own a smartphone, or prefer not to download the app, can participate in the initiative by filling out the questionnaire directly on the site.
The app has been available since last spring and in July the researchers published a preliminary study, based on two groups of users selected from the participants. One group included COVID-19 patients, while the second included people without symptoms and preferably from countries where the number of infections detected was very low.
Using a computer model based on a neural network (a series of algorithms that mimic the functioning of neurons in our brains), the researchers were able to detect the disease in 80 percent of cases by analyzing cough and cough recordings. breath of the participants. The result is promising, but will require further research and the creation of new models to obtain more accurate systems. For this reason, in August the researchers made the data collected so far available to other research groups.
In the future, it may be possible to use an app to find out if your cough is attributable to one of the symptoms of COVID-19. Of course, the test would not replace those via swab, but it could still offer an additional tool for diagnosis.
