Off Topic Coronavirus

Only as they’re so world-beating it would embarrass other countries.

 

Every Covid-19 Symptom We Know About Right Now, From Head to Toe
The most perplexing things about a disease that has proved vexing, deadly, and ‘unprecedented in many ways’

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Robert Roy Britt
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May 18 · 7 min read

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Photo illustration; Image source Getty Images
The novel coronavirus seems able to infiltrate just about every inch of the human body, from the brain to the heart and lungs, into the gut, and right down to the toes, causing a dizzying array of symptoms ranging from annoying to fatal. It’s a list that doctors expect to grow even longer.

“It’s been unprecedented in many ways,” says Robert Salata, MD, a professor of medicine in epidemiology and international health at Ohio’s Case Western Reserve University. “In terms of the complications we’re seeing, it’s incredible.”

Covid-19 is among the most dangerous and intractable new viral diseases seen in years, perhaps decades. It “can attack almost anything in the body with devastating consequences,” says Harlan Krumholz, MD, a cardiologist at Yale New Haven Hospital. “Its ferocity is breathtaking and humbling.”

Severe cases often involve two phases, explains Mahalia Desruisseaux, MD, an associate professor of internal medicine focusing on infectious diseases at Yale University School of Medicine. As with the flu or other viral infections, Covid-19 typically subsides after several days, because the immune system mounts a response and neutralizes the virus, Desruisseaux says. But for some people, especially those over 65 and those with underlying health conditions and sometimes even in healthy adults and even children, a second phase kicks in.

Cells in key organs and entire body systems can become inflamed and damaged irreparably, and the risk of deadly blood clots skyrockets.

“The inflammatory response to the virus gets disproportionately exaggerated, triggering massive inflammation in several organs,” Desruisseaux says. “The flu-like viral illness seems to start to get better, and then boom, the overactive immune response just hits.”

Cells in key organs and entire body systems can become inflamed and damaged irreparably, and the risk of deadly blood clots skyrockets. “It’s our own immune system going haywire,” Salata tells Elemental.

Here are most of the known symptoms of Covid-19, followed below by deeper explanations for some of the strangest aspects of the disease.

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Infographic by Elemental; Image source: LEONELLO CALVETTI/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY/Getty Images
The strangest cases
The coronavirus infection begins mainly in the throat, and for many people, it may not go beyond that. But in some cases, the virus dives deep into the lungs, or the mucus-encased viruses can slide from the throat into the stomach. From there, it can spread elsewhere through the entire digestive system and into the bloodstream.

The lungs contain a large concentration of cells that have receptors for SARS-CoV-2, meaning the virus can easily gain entry to the cells, hijacking their genetic machinery in order to reproduce. This process damages or destroys lung cells and triggers the massive immune response, often leading to hospitalization.

But those same receptor cells exist in blood vessels, in the brain-blood barrier, in the intestines, and in nerve endings, possibly explaining why this coronavirus is able to wreak havoc in so many areas of the body.

Brain swelling and confusion
Fever and headaches can be signs of many illnesses, and they are symptoms of Covid-19, too. Some people have gone to health care facilities in states of confusion or disorientation, sometimes with headaches and fever, sometimes not, only to be diagnosed with Covid-19.

In one case study, brain scans revealed swelling on the brain of a Covid-19 patient, a condition known in other viral infections to cause altered mental status and seizures. One study of 214 Covid-19 patients found 36.4% had neurological symptoms, including dizziness, headaches, impaired consciousness, and seizures.

It’s not yet known if the coronavirus actually infects the brain or if the brain-related symptoms happen because the disease’s impact on the lungs also rob the brain of oxygen.“It is very difficult to separate the two,” says Chethan Rao, MD, a practicing physician and associate professor of neurology and neurosurgery at Baylor College of Medicine Medical Center.

Cytokine storm
When people infected with Covid-19 develop the classic symptom of breathing difficulty, it’s because the coronavirus has infected the lungs and the immune system is at work.

Most patients recover. But if the infection persists, the immune system goes into overdrive, releasing a flood of inflammatory proteins, called cytokines, that contribute to cell death and lead to acute respiratory distress syndrome.

When a cytokine storm strikes, lung tissue can become irreversibly scarred, the lungs fill with fluid, and patients often die. The flood of cytokines also fuels an overload of white blood cells, one of the body’s primary protectors which, in the confusion, begins to attack healthy cells, according to a May 13 study in the journal Frontiers in Public Health. This overaction by the immune system causes hyperinflammation in tissues that can also affect other parts of the body by causing leaky blood vessels, extremely low blood pressure, and a lack of oxygen in the blood.

Silent hypoxia and Covid pneumonia
Some people with Covid-19 develop dangerously low levels of oxygen in their blood but otherwise don’t feel terribly sick. They might complain of mild flu-like symptoms and perhaps a little shortness of breath or maybe just tiredness.

The condition has been called silent hypoxia and resembles the low oxygen levels a person suffers when breathing the thin air at high altitudes. These people are in critical condition, though they don’t realize it. (X-rays reveal their air sacs in the lungs are filled with fluid or pus.) The low oxygen levels, untreated, can quickly cascade into serious breathing problems and damage to other organs.

Scientists don’t know exactly what’s going on, but some doctors are calling the condition Covid pneumonia. Autopsies of a small number of people who died from Covid-19 find, because of all the water, lungs weighing more than four pounds, and in one case seven and a half pounds, compared to the normal average of under two pounds.

Blood clots
Only recently have doctors realized that Covid-19 seems to be infecting blood and damaging blood vessels. In one study, 31% of people in intensive care with Covid pneumonia had blood clots. These clots, which the body creates in an effort to stop bleeding, can break up and travel to the lungs or cut off blood flow to the brain, causing a stroke.

“Blood thinners don’t reliably prevent clotting in people with Covid-19, and young people are dying of strokes caused by the blockages in the brain,” science writer Cassandra Willyard notes in a review of the early research on the topic for the journal Nature.

The presence of blood clots can be indicated by levels of protein fragments from the clot, called D-dimer. Doctors are seeing unusually high D-dimer levels in many Covid-19 patients.

“We’ve never seen such high levels before,” says Salata, the Case Western physician. One woman recently had levels that were “just not heard of before,” he said. He and his colleagues are finding major clots as well as unusual numbers of smaller clots that can damage the heart, lungs, kidneys, and other organs.

Inflammatory syndrome in children
In late April and early May, a mysterious toxic shock syndrome began showing up in children in various countries, causing at least three deaths in New York. Some cases have been firmly tied to Covid-19 diagnoses; others have not.

The symptoms of pediatric multisystem inflammatory syndrome, as it’s being called, resemble an unrelated syndrome called Kawasaki disease, a leading cause of heart disease in children. Both are marked by high fever, rash, cracked lips, and bloodshot eyes.

It’s not clear yet if Covid-19 and Kawasaki disease are perhaps occurring simultaneously, but Salata thinks the new cases are probably yet another severe immune-system reaction to Covid-19 that only looks like Kawasaki disease. “We don’t know for sure,” Salata says, “but that’s what it really looks like.”

Loss of smell and taste
The loss of smell, called anosmia, can be caused by the common cold, when congestion mucks up nose and nasal passages. Other diseases can trigger anosmia by disrupting or killing the olfactory nerves high in the nasal cavity.

But doctors were surprised earlier this year when people with anosmia and no other symptoms, or only mild symptoms, tested positive for Covid-19. It’s not yet certain how Covid-19 triggers anosmia, but remember those receptor cells that readily receive the coronavirus, present in the lungs and elsewhere? Similar cells exist in the olfactory epithelium, a layer of skin containing the neurons that detect scents.

Covid toes
Yet another bizarre symptom of Covid-19 is ischemia of the fingers and toes, a reduction of blood flow that causes red or purplish lesions at the ends of the digits. Dubbed Covid toes, the condition can be painful and, if left untreated, can lead to tissue death. It’s showing up mostly but not exclusively in younger people, who sometimes have few other symptoms or none.

Like anosmia, Covid toe tends to heal without long-term complications, but both can be signs that someone has Covid-19 and is infectious, even if they feel no other symptoms.

Like many other complications of Covid-19, researchers have barely had time to study the reasons beyond this symptom, but one analysis, published April 15 in The Lancet, suggests it’s due to reduced function in small blood vessels.

What’s next?
Covid-19 is not alone among germs in generating a range of mild to serious outcomes.

“Viruses are so weird,” says Yonatan Grad, MD, an assistant professor of immunology and infectious diseases at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Grad doesn’t mean to discount the devastating effects viruses can have, but he says they can bring “all sorts of unusual manifestations.”

The herpes virus causes unsightly cold sores, for example, but can also prompt a deadly swelling of the brain. The poliovirus generates no visible symptoms in most people while about 1 in 200 ends up with parts of their bodies paralyzed.

Meanwhile, Covid-19 likely has more surprises in store.

“We don’t know everything about this virus,” Salata says. “So stay tuned. I’m not sure we’ve seen it all yet.”

 

Coronavirus may have been created in a Wuhan lab ‘genetic engineering’ experiment
EXCLUSIVE | Sharri Markson|01/06/2020|19min


A growing number of scientists are raising the possibility COVID-19 was created in a laboratory, saying the option cannot be ruled out.
Leading immunologists and geneticists say that there are two unusual things about COVID-19 that open the door to it being man-made rather than a naturally-occurring virus.
The first is that the virus binds to human ACE2 receptor cells more strongly than it does to any other animal, including bats.
The second unusual thing about the virus that causes COVID-19 is that it has what’s called a “furin cleavage site” that its closest genetic bat-coronavirus relative, RaTG-13, does not have. This site makes it significantly more infectious.
Israeli geneticist, Dr Ronen Shemesh, who is working on treatment for COVID-19, said in his opinion the virus was more likely created in a laboratory than evolved in nature. “There are many reasons to believe that the COVID-19 generating SARS-CoV-2 was generated in a lab. Most probably by methods of genetic engineering,” he told Sky News. “I believe that this is the only way an insertion like the FURIN protease cleavage site could have been introduced directly at the right place and become effective.”
Dr Shemesh points to the insertion of a Furin site as the most unusual aspect of COVID-19. “I believe that the most important issue about the differences between ALL coronavirus types is the insertion of a Fufin protease cleavage site at the Spike protein of SARS-CoV-2,” he said. “Such an insertion is very rare in evolution, the addition of such 4 Amino acids alone in the course of only 20 years is very unlikely.”
Dr Shemesh, who has a PhD in Genetics and Molecular Biology from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and over 21 years of experience in the field of drug discovery and development, said it is even “more unlikely” that this insertion happened in exactly the right place of the cleavage site of the spike protein - which is where it would need to occur to make the virus more infectious. “What makes it even more suspicious is that fact that this insertion not only occurred on the right place and in the right time, but also turned the cleavage site from an Serine protease cleavage site to a FURIN cleavage site,” he said. “This protein cleaving protein is highly promiscuous, it's found in many Human tissues and cell types and is involved in many OTHER virus types activation and infection mechanisms (it is involved in HIV, Herpes, Ebola and Dengue virus mechanisms). “If I was trying to engineer a virus strain with a higher affinity and infective potential to humans, I would do exactly that: I would add a Furin Cleavage site directly at the original less effective and more cell specific cleavage site.”
La Trobe University Chemistry and Physics Professor David Winkler says there are several possibilities for the source of COVID-19 and you cannot rule out the laboratory as one option. “On the basis of the calculations we’ve done, you can’t exclude that it’s been processed through human cells in a biosecurity lab - but it’s certainly not the only explanation,” he said. Flinders University Professor Nikolai Petrovsky says COVID-19 is “exquisitely adapted to infect humans”. “We really don’t know where this virus came from - that’s the truth.
The two possibilities is that it was a chance transmission of a virus...the other possibility is that it was an accidental release of the virus from a laboratory,” he said. “One of the possibilities is that an animal host was infected by two coronaviruses at the same time and COVID-19. The same process can happen in a petri-dish. “In other words COVID-19 could have been created from that recombination event in an animal host or it could have occurred in a cell-culture experiment. "I'm certainly very much in favour of a scientific investigation.
Its only objective should be to get to the bottom of how did this pandemic happen and how do we prevent a future pandemic." Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and University of British Columbia biologist, Alina Chan, said there was little evidence to definitively say where COVID-19 originated. Dr Chan said there is no current evidence to show that the coronavirus originated in the Wuhan wet market. "If intermediate animal hosts were present at the market, no evidence remains in the genetic samples available,” she said. “There is no publicly available genetic evidence of cross-species transmission at the Huanan seafood market. But at the same time we cannot rule out the Huanan seafood market because we have not been able to analyze other data, eg, animal samples, from the market.” She said human adaptation in nature and in a laboratory is possible
. “Did SARS-CoV-2 transmit across species into humans and circulate undetected for months prior to late 2019 while accumulating adaptive mutations?” she said.
“Or was SARS-CoV-2 already well adapted for humans while in bats or an intermediate species?"

 

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Ruth Davidson
@RuthDavidsonMSP
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11h

Scotland currently has the capacity to carry out 15,500 COVID tests per day. Yesterday only 2,729 were conducted (42% down on last week and a new low). If we are to successfully test, trace and isolate, we simply must do more tests.

 

I was a bit doubtful about the very low levels of COVID deaths in Eastern Europe and the Balkans. But it turns out that all these countries have something in common, a 90% plus rate of BCG (TB) vaccination. No evidence based link as yet, but very interesting.

 

I thought pretty much everyone here had BCG too...we certainly did at school back in the 80's.
Very much doubt a link...

 

Stopped in the 90s in most places, because our magnificent public health service said that we had beaten TB, now on the rise again.The suggestion is that it helps against getting severe versions of COVID, not that it is a vaccine in itself. As I said, no evidence.

 

I could have sworn I had mine in 2001.

 

Surely with Coronavirus being one that affects oldies worse, the discontinuing of the BCG later on shouldn't make our death rate significantly higher.

I remember passing out in the queue to get mine done in about 1990 at the thought of the syringe. I still had it done - laying down. I am a true alpha male.

 

I see the government have been slated by the statistics watchdog this morning and the Lords Scientific Committee have been told that an influx of cases from, particularly, Spain and Italy in February and early March have exacerbated our bad situation. So maybe having continuously open airports and allowing travelling Atletico Madrid fans to come over for a match were bad ideas.

 

BCG Protection declines with time and probably only lasts about ten years.

Anyway, no evidence so no need to labour the point.

 

Yeah but we got round to imposing the latest and most half-hearted quarantine in the world only three months later so it’s too early to say we got it wrong.

 

If commoners like you and I realise there is an impact from open airports and visiting football supporters, why does the Government think that there has been neglible effect on the UK number of cases?

 

Cause we like are all stoopid and they have those clever smart sciencey people helping them out init

 

Anyone with half a brain knew it was a bad idea. Obviously the government had other plans

 

It's just more of the same from the government. Lies, cover-ups, corruption, fiddling of numbers. What a disgrace they are. Cant believe anyone could vote for these lot

 

I had a BCG jab whilst at school in Kensal Rise Juniors. Must have been the late 60’s or early 70’s.

However, there does seem to be different sets of results between West and the former East Europe.

Apparently, it is also clearly visible in the German Lands of the former West and East Germany.

I have seen no reports or articles on this, so would welcome any links to facts on this topic.

 

Let me know when we’ve got enough info to determine whether or not the government has done a good job. Bill at the post office reckons Macedonia are lying about their death toll.

 

What a bloody mess.