J. Cleverley, J. Piper, M. Jones
BMJ, 2020
### What you need to know Covid-19 is likely to remain an important differential diagnosis for the foreseeable future in anyone presenting to hospital with a flu-like illness, lymphopenia on full blood count, and/or a change in normal sense of smell (anosmia) or taste.12 Most people with covid-19 infection do not develop pneumonia3; however, chest radiography of people who are seriously ill with respiratory symptoms when they present to hospital can help to identify those with covid-19 pneumonia. In this article we offer advice to non-radiologists on how to look for changes on chest radiograph that may be suggestive of covid-19 pneumonia, as prompt review and report from an onsite or remote radiologist is not always available. The recommendations in this article are based on a combination of emerging evidence, current guidelines, and our clinical experience. For the radiograph examples used in this article, we cannot confirm whether each patient tested positive for covid-19 because we did not have access or ethical approval to access these patients’ clinical records; however, they were all diagnosed with covid-19 pneumonia as they had supportive radiographical features during the covid-19 pandemic. No fixed definition of covid-19 pneumonia exists; in this article the term is used when describing patients with clinical features of covid-19 infection who have either clinical or radiological evidence of pneumonia,45 or acute respiratory distress.1 Like other pneumonias, covid-19 pneumonia causes the density …
Cited by 55 publications.
Field of study: Medicine