NEW DELHI: Conjunctivitis or pink eye is emerging as a new Covid-19 symptom among children and adults, too, doctors said. As Covid-19 cases started spiking in India from March onwards, paediatricians in many cities reported that children — including infants — were getting infected with conjunctivitis, the predominant symptom of Covid-19 infection.
But now, doctors in Kerala said they found that adults detected with Covid-19 are being infected with Conjunctivitis, which is swelling of the conjunctiva – the thin layer that lines the white part of the eye and the inside of the eyelid.
According to Dr Anoop Kumar, Senior Consultant, Critical Care Medicine, Calicut, about 30 per cent of the patients he had seen had conjunctivitis also as a symptom of Covid-19. “This is a relatively uncommon symptom of Covid-19 and has not been seen before. Also, around 60 per cent of the people infected with Covid-19 had throat pain,” Dr Anoop Kumar told this newspaper.
He added that apart from conjunctivitis, patients also reported chill accompanied by fever. “All cases were mild to moderate, and the severity was not high. None of them developed pneumonia,” he added. Though this is the first time conjunctivitis as a Covod-19 symptom has been found in Kerala, paediatricians in many cities said they found this eye-related symptom among children, some even as young as one month.