Trail of Bubbles Leads Scientists to New Coronavirus Clue

Azuma Hazuki and SoyCow9642 (on IRC) both provide the same story:

Trail of bubbles leads scientists to new coronavirus clue:

A doctor checking comatose COVID-19 patients for signs of a stroke instead stumbled onto a new clue about how the virus may harm the lungs -- thanks to a test that used tiny air bubbles and a robot.

Dr. Alexandra Reynolds, a neurologist at New York's Mount Sinai Health System, initially was baffled as she tracked the cacophony of sound" made by those harmless bubbles passing through the bloodstream of patient after patient.

[...] A bedside test called a transcranial Doppler uses sound waves to track blood flow in the brain, but it was too risky for health workers to stand by patients' heads for long periods.

So Reynolds turned to a new robotic version, a headset that once positioned over the patient can automatically do the tracking. She used it to perform what's called a bubble study, a commonly used, painless test for stroke risk that involves injecting saline containing tiny air bubbles into a vein. As the microbubbles circulate, the smallest blood vessels in healthy lungs - called capillaries - will trap and filter them out of the bloodstream.

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