New test can find out how severe Covid-19 can be for a patient

Researchers have come up with a blood test that can tell which people are likely to be symptomatic if they get Covid-19 infection, which would help health care workers prioritise patients for hospitalisation and intensive care. The study is currently there in the American Chemical Society’s journal Analytics Chemistry.

The researchers chose a technique called attenuated total reflection courier transform infrared spectroscopy (AFT-FTIR) for the process in which researchers measure changes in blood biochemistry. The study is present in the American Chemical Society’s journal Analytic Chemistry. The mechanism was earlier used as a Covid-19 diagnostic tool.

FTIR spectra in two regions collected from 128 patient plasma samples showed small but observable differences between severe and non-severe Covid. While using the data together with clinical information about patients a statistical model can be formed to know if Covid-19 can cause theme severe symptoms. Although the patients having diabetes is a predictor, but the two regions of FITR spectra also had a lot to tell about the severity of Covid infection case by case.

When the FITR data was added to the model, it improved the chances for detecting severe symptoms in a different set of patients from 41.2 per cent to 94.1 per cent. And moreover, it reduced the specificity to 69.2 per cent when the clinal factors are taken into account alone.

The new test is more likely to identify severe cases but the chances of getting false positives is high as well.