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Clinical Care Quick Reference for COVID-19
Clinical Care Quick Reference for COVID-19
This quick reference highlights key COVID-19 Clinical Care information for healthcare professionals and provide selected links to full guidance and research for easier CDC web navigation.
COVID-19 Vaccination: Clinical Resources
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Caring for Patients
- Signs and symptoms of COVID-19 can include fever, chills, cough, shortness of breath, fatigue, muscle aches, headache, loss of taste or smell, sore throat, nasal congestion or rhinorrhea, vomiting or diarrhea, and skin rashes.
- Some patients with COVID-19 may progress to dyspnea and severe disease about one week after symptom onset.
- Clinicians who wish to consider the use of therapeutics, or other available investigational therapies, should review the Infectious Diseases Society of America (ISDA) Guidelines on the Treatment and Management of Patients with COVID-19 and the American College of Physicians Clinical Guidelines and Recommendations on COVID-19.
For patients who are at higher risk for severe illness from COVID-19, treatment is available.
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People at Increased Risk for Severe Illness
- Older adults are at higher risk for severe illness from COVID-19.
- People with multiple underlying medical conditions are more likely to get severely ill from COVID-19.
- The risk of severe COVID-19 increases with age and the number of underlying medical conditions.
- Long-standing systemic health and social inequities have put some groups of people at increased risk of getting very sick and dying from COVID-19.
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Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome (MIS)
- Multisystem inflammatory syndrome is a rare but serious complication associated with COVID-19 in this multiple organ systems become inflamed.
- MIS can affect children and adolescents (MIS-C) and adults (MIS-A).
- The MIS-C healthcare provider page provides information on clinical presentation, case definition of MIS-C, case report form (CRF), and more resources about MIS-C.
- CDC has developed a MIS-A case definition for healthcare providers.
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Post-COVID Conditions
- Post-COVID conditions describe a range of new, returning, or ongoing health issues that persist
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Translation
four or more weeks after a person is first infected with the virus that causes COVID-19, sometimes after initial symptom recovery.
- New or ongoing symptoms can occur in people who had varying degrees of illness during acute infection, including patients who had mild or asymptomatic infections.
- Medical and research communities are still learning about post-acute symptoms and clinical findings.
Get more details: Evaluating and Caring for Patients with Post-COVID Conditions
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Caring for Special Populations
- For healthcare providers caring for children, CDC provides information about caring for children with suspected or confirmed COVID-19.
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Reinfection
- Reinfection with the virus that causes COVID-19 means a person was infected, recovered, and then later became infected again.
- Most people will have some protection from reinfection, but the emergence of variants (new strains of the virus) can increase the risk of reinfection.
Get more details: Reinfections and COVID-19