[FRIAM] COVID SaO2 at 7k feet

[Steve Smith]

On 9/27/21 4:11 PM, uǝlƃ ☤>$ wrote:
> What am I struggling with?

 "But while fighting my infection"   I took this to mean you were "struggling" with an infection.  I understand/appreciate that your SPO2 numbers weren't necessarily causing you any symptoms... I assume you were measuring them for some reason though?   Curiousity I get... I used mine as crude biofeedback to (re)learn how to breath properly, but most of the time I was taking readings out of curiosity...  trying to understand correlations between what felt like a good, hard measure (SPO2) and various activities and symptoms.

>  Thanks for the stories about SpO2. They nicely demonstrate that variation is normal. To be clear, when I talk about SpO2, I'm not talking about symptoms at all. I'm simply talking about the number that comes from the little machine. I've never had any symptoms that correlate with a low SpO2 measurement. And I think your (and Nick's) stories indicate that there's little, if any, correlation between the two (symptoms and low SpO2).
I'd say that the effects of low SPO2 are less obvious (to a point) than
one would imagine...  I can't say that when I was down in the 70s, there
was no correlation with my fatigue, chills, blue lips and fingernails,
etc...
> However, what was interesting to me during this very normal cold was my elevated heart rate. Even though I quit running seriously about 5 years ago, my resting heart rate is ~63. I've never really monitored it through other infections. But because I happen to have that number along with SpO2, now, I noticed that at the nadir/height of the infection, my resting heart rate was ~100 or ~90 bpm. It's about 80 now, on day 10 since symptoms started. It just never crossed my mind that infections like the rhino would raise your heart rate. But I guess it's common.
One might guess that low SPO2 might raise your heart rate to deliver the
same amount of O2 per unit time?