Untangling Covid-19, Altitude Sickness, and Conspiracy Theory

An emerging hypothesis has been mischaracterized by the alternative media

There’s a lot doctors still don’t know about Covid-19 and how it affects the body. While its usual symptoms — cough, trouble breathing, tiredness, and fever — are well documented, some of its other effects remain unexplained. In particular, a peculiar observation about the blood oxygen levels of some people with Covid-19 has generated some new hypotheses among physicians — and dangerous speculation among the alternative media.

One of the first things doctors do when people show up at the ER is check their oxygen saturation — the amount of oxygen being carried in the blood. In healthy people, saturation is normally above 95%. But some patients, writes Dr. Reuben Strayer, an emergency physician at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, New York, in an article published by Scientific American, present with “the kind of very low saturations that we associate with cyanosis and respiratory distress — but they were comfortably speaking to us or texting on their phones.”

This unusual phenomenon, he writes, is very “disorienting” because doctors often rely on this measurement to guide their work. Some physicians, he notes, suggest that the physiology of Covid-19 resembles that seen in people with altitude sickness. The prevailing characteristic of altitude sickness is low oxygen saturation, and similar symptoms can be observed when a diver…