Garmin: Suggest feature to detect Covid-19

You can get over a cold virus with no major symptoms.  Babies and young children especially, and you can pass it on during that un-symptomatic time.

Best wishes from Italy!

It’s a nice idea but in practice, there are so many conditions that will alter your physiological metrics that using devices for detection alone is not useful. It will increase demand on the healthcare system with a lot of false positives which is not what we want right now.

I work in healthcare and a common saying is treat the patient, not the monitor.

For example, literally any illness will effect respiratory rate. As will alcohol, stimulants, atmospheric pollutants, heat, cold, elevation, stress, anxiety, base fitness level, fitness load etc etc

Pulse oximetry is effected by heat/ cold/ skin tone/ elevation/ nail polish (for the fingertip readers)/ movement/ reduced blood flow to the limb (sleeping on your side), smoking, a large number of illnesses etc, etc.

HR is effected by heat/ cold/ hydration status/ elevation/ oxygenation/ infection/ caffeine/ stimulants/ prescription medications/ smoking/ alcohol/ anxiety/ stress/ fitness load and most illnesses/ injuries etc, etc.

Get well soon but nice suggestions for a monitoring.

From the Garmin Fenix 6 manual: "This is not a medical device."
And it will most likely never be due to legal implications.

You will never be able to detect COVID-19 with any Garmin watch, or any watch for that matter.

The best you can do is look at the trend in your resting heart rate and deduce that something might be wrong.

That is not the point. But feeling bad and having a 60 pulse OX is a way different things. And I usually feel really bad even with a simple cold/flu - but all those I can cure at home. If I will have low pulse ox as well, then maybe it is the time call the doc, _before_ it will be critical.

I have no experience, I am just guessing of course, still, I had some bad cough recently, but it was a bit of relieving to see that all measurement by the watch was pretty normal.

Fitness watches are not medical devices and lack any accuracy to determine in any way a medical condition or disease. The FDA is responsible to approve medical devices which is very expensive and I doubt that Garmin would go through that ordeal. 

There are ways around that. Such as they do with High/Low HR warnings. Pretty much, they just say that it's meant to be informative only, and it's completely on you (and your doctor) to decide if it's anything to worry about.

Obviously, there's no way for the watch to conclusively say "You definitely have COVID-19" or "You definitely don't have COVID-19". What the OP and others are asking for, is something that just warns you if things (stress, resting HR, sleep pulseOX, etc) seem abnormally high or low. Same as we have for abnormally high/low HR - the warning doesn't say "You're about to go into cardiac arrest" or "your heart is perfectly healthy", it just says (in essence) "hey, you might want to pay attention because things don't quite seem right".

What I think would be cool, is a morning "announcement" that shows what my resting HR, body battery, and sleep pulseOX measurements were that night, with the delta from what the average readings are.

For example, when you wake up in the morning, your watch displays this:

• Body battery recharged +65 (5 more than average)
• Resting HR 55 (2 less than average)
• Sleep PulseOX Avg 93% (2% less than average)

Yes, all that information is available if you want to dig it up yourself manually, but it would be cool to get that kind of a summary each morning to be able to tell at a glance what kind of condition you're in. Most days, I don't bother looking at those metrics. So it would be cool for the watch to show me all in one place automatically. Maybe it only displays this "announcement" if things are some % off from your average.

If you wake up and might be getting sick, but don't have any obvious symptoms yet, you might be able to get somewhat of a "heads up" that things might not be doing so well, if your morning summary said:

• Body battery recharged +25 (65 less than average)
• Resting HR 65 (15 more than average)
• Sleep PulseOX Avg 87% (7% less than average)

Would it say you have COVID-19? Nope, but it might be enough to give you a little early warning that you should maybe take it easy today and limit physical contact with loved ones.