Uncommon presentation of COVID-19: Gastrointestinal bleeding

Abstract

The COVID-19 outbreak has become a pandemic that is threatening global health. The typical clinical manifestations were fever, cough, dyspnea, and myalgia or fatigue. Digestive symptoms such as nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, abdominal pain usually accompany respiratory symptoms. However gastrointestinal bleeding as the first symptom is not reported. Here we reported a case of COVID-19 with gastrointestinal bleeding as the initial symptom to the emergency department with a real-time reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction test positive, and normal thorax tomography. The case demonstrate that; clinicians should be alerted to patients about COVID-19 when referring to atypical symptoms and every patient undergoing endoscopy should be considered potentially infected or can infect others.

Keywords: COVID-19; Emergency; Endoscopy; Gastrointestinal bleeding.

Figure 1

Electrocardiogram showing sinus tachycardia and ischemia in the inferolateral derivation on admission, pulse: 108 beats.min⁻¹.

Figure 2

CT scan of the chest showing normal lung on admission.