They included young people of different backgrounds and ethnicities with intense fatigue and a six-year-old child with a very high pulse rate,she said. None suffered from a loss of taste or smell.
“Their symptoms were so different and so mild from those I had treated before,” said Coetzee,a GP for 33 years who chairs South Africa’s Medical Association alongside running her practice.
On November 18,when four family members all tested positive for COVID-19 with complete exhaustion,she informed the country’s vaccine advisory committee.
She said,in total,about two dozen of her patients have tested positive for COVID-19 with symptoms of the new variant. They were mostly healthy men who turned up “feeling so tired”. About half of them were unvaccinated.
“We had one very interesting case,a kid,about six-years-old,with a temperature and a very high pulse rate,and I wondered if I should admit her,but when I followed up two days later she was so much better,” Coetzee says.
Coetzee,who was briefing other African medical associations on Saturday,made clear her patients were all healthy and she was worried the new variant could still hit older people - with co-morbidities like diabetes or heart disease - much harder.