Through the use of cutting-edge unsupervised classification techniques from statistics and machine learning, we characterise symptom phenotypes among symptomatic SARS-CoV-2 PCR-positive community cases. We first analyse each dataset in isolation and across age bands, before using methods that allow us to compare multiple datasets. While we observe separation due to the total number of symptoms experienced by cases, we also see a separation of symptoms into gastrointestinal, respiratory and other types, and different symptom co-occurrence patterns at the extremes of age. In this way, we are able to demonstrate the deep structure of symptoms of COVID-19 without usual biases due to study design. This is expected to have implications for the identification and management of community SARS-CoV-2 cases and could be further applied to symptom-based management of other diseases and syndromes.
@article{arxiv.2111.05728,
title = {Diversity of symptom phenotypes in SARS-CoV-2 community infections observed in multiple large datasets},
author = {Martyn Fyles and Karina-Doris Vihta and Carole H Sudre and Harry Long and Rajenki Das and Caroline Jay and Tom Wingfield and Fergus Cumming and William Green and Pantelis Hadjipantelis and Joni Kirk and Claire J Steves and Sebastien Ourselin and Graham F Medley and Elizabeth Fearon and Thomas House},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2111.05728},
year = {2023}
}