One of the answers to COVID-19 is probably at your fingertip, doctors say. With growing experience of dealing with sick people who report to hospitals with breathlessness, experts have recommended the use of a relatively cheap device at home that can forewarn you about any impending crisis – the pulse oximeter. The small device, which fits into the palm of your hand, measures the oxygen saturation in the blood in a non-invasive manner. All one needs to do is clip the device onto a finger tip, and it will show the SpO2 level (peripheral oxygen saturation), or the oxygen level in the blood. Its role in COVID-19 patients’ health monitoring is significant. “Silent hypoxia (deprivation of oxygen at the tissue level) has emerged as a major cause of death in COVID-19 patients, ” said K. Kolandaswamy, former director of public health. “Usually, when your oxygen falls below 95%, you will have symptoms, breathlessness, a feeling of discomfort certainly. Now, in COVID-19, for some reason, that is not happening. Patients are not feeling the drop in oxygen levels at all until they are dangerously low. When they finally land up in hospital, they sometimes have a SpO2 of 80% or 75%, and are in respiratory distress, ” he explained.