I'll go the other way, I've had elevated RHR showing on my 935. My 'performance condition' has been -7 for running, cycling. Separately my O2 saturation has been 98% when tested in a medical centre 2 weeks apart. I've been feeling extremely fatigued, mentally and physically.

And my COVID test was negative..... My point being, that if you're trying to work out if you've had covid from garmin, there's a good chance you'd flag yourself as a false positive.

Beware the false negative rate(for this type of test at least):


"The false-negative rate for SARS-CoV-2 RT-PCR testing is highly variable: highest within the first 5 days after exposure (up to 67%), and lowest on day 8 after exposure (21%)."

"Based on this analysis, the false-negative rate for SARS-CoV-2 RT-PCR is shockingly high, even at its lowest on day 8 post-exposure, or 3 days after symptoms."

Indeed, although I live in NZ, where nationally we've had 1500 cases, the majority picked up overseas and brought back on a plane, and of the remaining almost all (I think 5 in total aren't) have been linked to one of 16 clusters, none of which I've had any connection with. And so note the probability of a false negative on a test is fairly high, but the chance of me having had it at all is miniscule.

Still, my point being here, that trying to ascertain if you have / have had covid using anything but a formal medical assessment is dubious, and indeed could be very dangerous. If you've got a concern, go see a medical professional. There are few things where Dr Google is a wise way to go, and Covid isn't one of them..

Yes. Agree. The reason I ask is because I am working with a team of physicists, engineers and data scientists to work on developing alternative assessments to trigger screening.... we know temperature checks are pretty much pointless.... I am wondering if anyone has noticed that other physiological measures might be able to also flag a covid positive.... before I go on a long walk in the woods to develop these technologies—- I’m wondering if people who are more acutely keyed into this data than the general population have noticed any deviations.

I do not recall any posts in this forum of someone first-hand infected with covid. Seems like you need to find a pool of data of confirmed covid positive cases and Garmin 945 or AWS5 wearers.

In order to be smaller, and workable on a wrist, garmin uses a 1 light, reflective method to measure pulse-ox, vs finger tip which is 2 lights and through the finger.

https://www.theverge.com/...tbit-garmin-oximeter

Basically, it just doesnt work (certainly not for an large swings).

if you want something to measure accurately, your going to want something like a massimo

Thanks. Yes. Was hoping to get some proof of concept before jumping into primary data collection.

Yes. That would be the holy grail. I know I have a friend who is a physician who was treating an Ironman athlete... not sure if he had any data. But I’m guessing given the global numbers....Someone has to has to have some data out there.

Statistically speaking, your probability of finding someone with a confirmed infection is extremely low. Only 0.07% of the global population is known to be infected. In the US, the known cases are only 0.5% of the population.

Ohhh, well that's good. I assumed you lived in a governmental shitshow like the US. Carry on, you guys have it handled down there :)

We are still talking 5 million cases worldwide... none of these are Ironman athletes with good Physiologic data (O2 sat etc?) pre-post covid positive testing?

its an interesting concept but i think you might struggle.
firstly, you are looking for people who know they have had covid but asymptomatic, then cutting the pool to those who monitor reasonably rare stats.
beyond that, my experience is that RHR will indicate sickness, but usually only after symptoms have made it all too obvious. i have not noticed any clear spo2 pattern but haven't had that through many illnesses.
i don't see why these physiological measures would show asymptomatic infection as they are effectively measuring symptoms. we measure these things to detect when we are physically struggling, be it from training, stress or illness.
finally, any such test is purely showing illness, not specifically covid. that is still a valuable thing as any cold/flu illness should trigger basically the same actions to prevent spread as we are now all frantically applying to covid.

I am sure there are some, but finding a meaningful number is the literal needle in a haystack.

To keep it simple and on the optimistic side, just look at US numbers... Say there are about 50K active Ironman racers in the US. That is about 0.03% of the US population. You are looking for the intersection of the 0.5% of known infected with CV and the 0.03% who are athletes. In simple math, that is 0.00015% of the population, or about 500 people.

And of those 500- if I could get maybe 12... I could probably make something out of it, if there was something to find. I just don’t know if there is something to find.

Yes. I think there would be a deviation in resting heart rate. Maybe a deviation in respiratory rate, maybe a deviation in beat to beat variability combined with temperature, this might be one way if signaling who should be screened in a high risk setting (Ie a nursing home setting) right now the metric is... stay home if you have a fever- which is a piss poor indicator for covid- so it could provide a useful data point... maybe... I don’t know.. so I’d like to take a gander at any data out there if it happens to exist.

I think it is an awesome objective. I have used my RHR for the past few years as early sickness detection. When I am getting sick with a cold, my RHR will jump about 4 BPM 2-3 days before I notice my first symptom. I am sure it is similar for CV people, and especially if you can combine it with Pulse Ox.

Just going off the statistics, 300 of those likely CV & triathlete people live in NY or one of the immediately surrounding states.