Mumbai: Back-breaking pain in many recovering from Omicron

MUMBAI: Symptoms of Omicron may be increasingly labelled as mild but many recovering from it say they are grappling with excruciating body pain and weakness for days. Lower back pain is another recurrent complaint doctors are being presented with.

For Vikhroli resident Namrata (32), her symptoms started with sore throat, chills and fever. In a day, she was experiencing acute pain in her legs and back. “Every bone in my body was hurting. More than paracetamol, I needed painkillers,” she said, adding that the pain eased by the third day. Another Andheri resident said her fever and most other symptoms subsided with basic fever medication, but severe pain in the lower back was something she’d never experienced.

South Africa’s health insurer had done an analysis of Omicron symptoms and found that sore throat ranked among most common early symptoms, with congestion, dry cough and lower back pain. In Mumbai, doctors said that a low-grade fever and headache are reported by most patients. In some cases, fatigue and weakness last till the seventh or eighth day.

Physician Dr Hemant Thacker said body ache (myalgia), backache, low-grade fever, irritation of throat, are classic signs of flu seen in Omicron patients. “In dengue also you get bone-breaking pain, body ache and backache for three days before it starts to get better. Similarly, most Omicron patients start improving by the third or fourth day,” he said, adding that it was exacerbating diabetes and hypertension in patients with these diseases.

Dr Hemant Gupta, head of medicine at JJ Hospital, said the lower back pain is sometimes caused by gastritis due to medicines, including antibiotics. “In many cases, patients already have underlying aches and pains which get aggravated,” he said. But largely many are clear of the virus by the fifth day as their Rt-PCR tests turn negative by then, he added.

The term ‘mild’ is more for duration of illness, said physician Dr Pratit Samdani. “Most patients have upper respiratory and musculoskeletal symptoms that last for three to five days,” he said. The big difference from Delta is that lungs are not affected. “We are not seeing thromboembolic events either such as strokes, heart attacks,” Samdani added.