Kenyan doctors raise alarm over new COVID-19 symptoms

NAIROBI, Kenya

Kenyan doctors Tuesday raised the alarm over new symptoms among COVID-19 patients in the East African country, calling for extreme caution.

Dr. Andrew Gachie, the chief medical officer of Nairobi West Hospital, told reporters that patients are showing a myriad of new symptoms aside from the usual dry cough and high fever.

“One of the things we have noticed is that the majority of patients are coming in with difficulty breathing with no fever or anything. They require intensive care as soon as admitted,” Citizen TV Kenya reported, quoting Gachie.

“Could we be dealing with a new virus or what? Scientifically, is [it] called a new mutant of the virus? These are the questions we need our scientists to answer. We need to be very careful about this virus, we’re not yet out of the woods.”

Kenyatta National Hospital (KNH), the country’s largest state-owned hospital, has also reported similar new COVID-19 symptoms.

Dr. Loise Ombajo, a virologist at KNH, told Citizen TV Kenya: “Some rare symptoms we have seen are, for example, diarrhea, vomiting, headache, and occasionally a rash.”

On Monday, 337 people tested positive for the virus, bringing the total confirmed cases to 109,164.

With three more deaths, the death toll jumped to 1,879, while total recoveries reached 87,623.

Kenya is currently vaccinating its frontline workers after receiving over 1 million doses of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine on March 3. The country expects to get 24 million doses within months.