Coronavirus 'acts like no pathogen humanity has ever seen,' say doctors
COVID-19 damage (yellow) on lungs of 59-year-old man who died at George Washington University Hospital. 3D model based on computerized tomography scans, courtesy George Washington Hospital and Surgical Theater
How exactly is coronavirus killing us?
This New York Magazine piece on what we do and do not yet know about the novel coronavirus is really good. It's weird seeing everyone compare COVID-19 to the flu, when there are reports coming in of patients dying of exploding hearts and glitching cytokines.
Stay the fuck at home, please. Follow the guidance of public health experts, not politicians and economists and nutjobs like Donald Trump. Wear masks, use gloves, wash hands. This thing is not a joke.
The invader's impact... SARS-CoV-2 lands in the lungs and can do deep damage there. But the virus, or the body's response to it, can injure many other organs. #COVID19 https://t.co/3K96LiJrRP pic.twitter.com/PoR71YjaX8
- Frits Franssen (@fritsfranssen) April 21, 2020
Writes David Wallace-Wells at New York mag's Intelligencer:
On April 15, the Washington Post reported that, in New York and Wuhan, between 14 and 30 percent of ICU patients had lost kidney function, requiring dialysis. New York hospitals were treating so much kidney failure "they need more personnel who can perform dialysis and have issued an urgent call for volunteers from other parts of the country. They also are running dangerously short of the sterile fluids used to deliver that therapy." The result, the Post said, was rationed care: patients needing 24-hour support getting considerably less. On Saturday, the paper reported that "[y]oung and middle-aged people, barely sick with COVID-19, are dying from strokes." Many of the patients described didn't even know they were sick:
The patient's chart appeared unremarkable at first glance. He took no medications and had no history of chronic conditions. He had been feeling fine, hanging out at home during the lockdown like the rest of the country, when suddenly, he had trouble talking and moving the right side of his body. Imaging showed a large blockage on the left side of his head. Oxley gasped when he got to the patient's age and covid-19 status: 44, positive.
The man was among several recent stroke patients in their 30s to 40s who were all infected with the coronavirus. The median age for that type of severe stroke is 74.
But the patient's age wasn't the only abnormality of the case:
As Oxley, an interventional neurologist, began the procedure to remove the clot, he observed something he had never seen before. On the monitors, the brain typically shows up as a tangle of black squiggles - "like a can of spaghetti," he said - that provide a map of blood vessels. A clot shows up as a blank spot. As he used a needlelike device to pull out the clot, he saw new clots forming in real-time around it.
"This is crazy," he remembers telling his boss.
These strokes, several doctors who spoke to the Post theorized, could explain the high number of patients dying at home - four times the usual rate in New York, many or most of them, perhaps, dying quite suddenly. According to the Brigham and Women's guidelines, only 53 percent of COVID-19 patients have died from respiratory failure alone.
It's not unheard of, of course, for a disease to express itself in complicated or hard-to-parse ways, attacking or undermining the functioning of a variety of organs. And it's common, as researchers and doctors scramble to map the shape of a new disease, for their understanding to evolve quite quickly. But the degree to which doctors and scientists are, still, feeling their way, as though blindfolded, toward a true picture of the disease cautions against any sense that things have stabilized, given that our knowledge of the disease hasn't even stabilized. Perhaps more importantly, it's a reminder that the coronavirus pandemic is not just a public-health crisis but a scientific one as well. And that as deep as it may feel we are into the coronavirus, with tens of thousands dead and literally billions in precautionary lockdown, we are still in the very early stages, when each new finding seems as likely to cloud or complicate our understanding of the coronavirus as it is to clarify it. Instead, confidence gives way to uncertainty.
More:
We Still Don't Know How the Coronavirus Is Killing Us
And here is the Scientific American piece referenced above:
How does coronavirus kill? Clinicians trace a ferocious rampage through the body, from brain to toes