Could lung ultrasound be used instead of auscultation ?

The covid-19 era poses significant and unprecedented challenges for re-organisation of care, redistribution of resources and rationing of services A review of patients' clinical characteristics showed a high prevalence of respiratory symptoms and respiratory failure which require full assessment However, the role for auscultation is not proven and may be a very risky strategy as the risk of cross infection with taking a stethoscope from a patient to the next is very tangible A recent editorial in the African Journal of Emergency medicine suggested Severity Scoring Tool for low resourced settings and mentioned auscultation . The stethoscope and auscultation have limited usefulness in the assessment of respiratory failure. Crackles on auscultation have a sensitivity of 19–67% and a specificity of 36–96%, with a positive likelihood ratio of 2.3 and a negative likelihood ration of 0.8 [7]. Thus, their use in ruling pneumonia in or out is limited as their presence or absence only slightly changes the initial diagnosis (poor inter observer reliability, 72% agreement, kappa value 0.41) [7]. One might argue on the value of detecting wheeze on auscultation. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) does not mention wheeze as a symptom of Covid-19 [8]. Furthermore, Xu et al. did not describe wheeze as a finding in 62 patients with Covid-19 [9] and as such wheeze does not seem to be present in such patients.....