A study on ocular symptomatology and clinical profile of coronavirus disease-19 positive patients admitted at a tertiary care institute in South India

Purpose: To study the ocular symptomatology and clinical profile of coronavirus disease-19 (COVID-19) positive patients admitted at a tertiary care institute. Methods: This cross-sectional, observational, and descriptive study was conducted on 200 reverse transcriptase-polymerase chain reaction positive confirmed COVID-19 patients in a tertiary care institute from September 2020 to October 2020. Ocular and systemic history was collected from the patients, clinical findings and investigation values were noted and analyzed. Results: Out of 200 COVID-19 positive patients in our study, 54% of the patients were graded as mild COVID-19 cases, 34% of the patients were graded as moderate, and 12% of the patients were graded as severe COVID-19 cases. The prevalence of ocular symptoms was 10.5%. Burning sensation of the eyes was the most common ocular symptom. A higher occurrence of ocular symptoms was observed in febrile patients and it was found to be statistically significant. The ocular symptoms worsened with a rise in temperature. Conclusion: Our study reveals that in COVID-19 positive patients, the most common systemic symptom was fever and the most common ocular symptom was burning sensation. In most of the cases, ocular symptoms appeared before or with the appearance of systemic symptoms. Most ocular symptoms were either mild or moderate grade. Ocular symptoms were higher in febrile patients with the severity increasing during febrile period in most patients. With this, we need to consider all patients coming to the outpatient department with complaints of burning sensation of eyes, eye pain and red eye as possible COVID-19 cases, and do due diligent workup.