Doctors Keep Discovering New COVID-19 Attacks
Damage to the kidney’s heart, brain—even ‘toes’—prompts reassessment of the disease and how to treat it
*Based on Washington Post (WaPo) article by Ariana Eunjung Cha – May 10, 2020, and supplemented with WaPo data from “Coronavirus destroys lungs, but doctors are finding its damage in kidneys, hearts and elsewhere,” by Laurie McGinley – May 8, 2020.
A recent article in the Washington Post called “Doctors keep discovering new ways the coronavirus attacks the body,” got my attention because it covered so many additional COVID-19 ailments/mortalities that so far have not been considered “common” symptoms of the novel coronavirus we’ve been dealing with for months now.
The thing is, we’ve been told again and again that this is a respiratory virus, attacking the lungs. But coronavirus attacks much more than then lungs, and COVID-19 kills in numerous ways neither common knowledge nor commonly discussed (at least, not yet). People are showing up to emergency rooms with symptoms like vomiting and diarrhea with a very mild fever, then suddenly going into critical condition and requiring a ventilator because the oxygen level in their blood dropped to a level near death.
I believe we all know by now that the coronavirus survives on surfaces, so anything you touch that someone has touched before you could then let the coronavirus attach to your skin. And the vast majority of things we touch, we do so with our hands. Luckily, the spiky receptors that give coronavirus its ‘crown’ name are destroyed by soap. Since we almost always touch surfaces with our hands, surface contact transfer can largely be eliminated as a risk factor simply by washing your hands with soap and water for twenty seconds between touching any surface/object and then touching your face.
What’s truly terrifying is that the new virus is airborne. The simple act of speaking can emit small droplets that linger in the air for at least eight minutes and potentially much longer. Anywhere you go, if someone carrying coronavirus has spoken (or coughed, a cough being much more dangerous because of the large respiratory droplets emitted by a cough) without wearing a mask, you can catch the virus simply by occupying that same space even after the person is gone. You don’t have to breathe it in, all you have to do is walk through the aforementioned space and the infected droplets can enter your body through the mucus membrane covering your eyes.
The disease caused by the novel coronavirus is called COVID-19, and its symptoms are turning out to be shockingly wide-ranging, including:
- Upper and lower respiratory damage
- Acute kidney disease
- Heart inflammation
- Neurological malfunction
- Blood clots
- Intestinal damage
- Liver problems
When researchers conducted autopsies on 26 people who died of COVID-19, they found that nine had acute kidney injuries and seven had particles of the coronavirus in their kidneys. Direct viral involvement of the kidney is distinct from what was seen in the 2002 SARS outbreak.
More disturbing to me personally is the discovery that coronavirus may also be damaging the heart. Given that I already have a heart condition, the last thing I want is to discover coronavirus particles can attach to the heart and cause additional problems like myocarditis (an inflammation of the heart muscle), and, even more dangerous, irregular heart rhythms that can lead to cardiac arrest.
And even more disturbing to me, a person with severe neuropathy (nerve damage) caused by chemotherapy, is how the coronavirus can crawl along the nervous system, destroying taste and smell and occasionally reaching the brain. In someone like me, with severely damaged neural pathways, I worry that the virus would be able to travel very quickly along my neural pathways right into my brain. If that led to a quick death, it would be less disturbing than if it simply caused permanent brain damage, but the reality is that until someone exactly like me gets COVID-19, there’s no way to know how quickly it would kill me. I did find a COVID calculator that put my probability of COVID-induced death at 52%, but that was based only on my heart condition and chemo-damaged immune system. So, my COVID morbidity is something a good deal greater than 50%. Basically, the only hope for me is to make sure I do not get coronavirus in the first place.
It’s like, even though I pay for two health insurance plans already (well, three, if you count the prescription-coverage one as separate from the doctor/illness related ones), I’m actually now just on the superseding health insurance plan pushed by Republican politicians for decades:
Republican Heath Plan
- Don’t get sick.
- If you do get sick, die quickly.
So, ok, enough of the sarcasm. There is a heck of a lot more disease presentations to COVID-19 than we knew previously. It attacks the heart. It savages kidneys. It sprawls through the nervous system to the brain. It creates blood clots that kill with sudden efficiency, and inflames blood vessels throughout the body. It can begin with a few symptoms or none at all, then days later, squeeze the air out of your lungs without warning. It harms more men than women but there are also signs it complicates pregnancies.
It mostly spares the young. That is, until it didn’t. Now we know there’s a [supposedly] rare inflammatory reaction with cardiac complications among children connected to the virus. Mount Sinai has treated five children with the condition. Each started with gastrointestinal symptoms, which turned into inflammatory complications that caused very low blood pressure and expanded their blood vessels. This led to heart failure in the first child [just five years old] that died.
Mother Nature has developed an incredibly pervasive and efficient way to limit any further damage the cancerous species of humans can do to the planet, that’s how I see it.
And what do we know now that we didn’t know a month or two ago? Well, most importantly, I suppose, is that there’s now a litany of known body parts/functions damaged by the disease.
COVID-19 Symptoms by Function:
BRAIN: Strokes from blood clots, neurological issues
NOSE: Loss of smell and taste (anosmia)
BLOOD: Unexpected blood clotting, attacks the lining of blood vessels
GASTROINTESTINAL SYSTEM: Vomiting and diarrhea
LUNGS: Clogs and inflames alveoli (air sacs), hampering breathing; pulmonary embolism from breakaway blood clots and microclots
HEART: Weakens heart muscle; causes dangerous arrhythmias and heart attacks due to small clots
KIDNEYS: Damage to structures that filter waste from blood; patients often require dialysis
SKIN: Purple rash on toes or fingers from the attack on blood vessels
IMMUNE SYSTEM: Widespread impact, including overactive immune response that attacks healthy tissue
As Ariana Eunjung Cha noted in her WaPo article, trying to define a pathogen in the midst of an ever-spreading epidemic is fraught with difficulties. Experts say it will be years before it is understood how the disease damages organs and how medications, genetics, diets, lifestyles and distancing impact its course.
Of the millions (or perhaps billions) of coronaviruses, six were previously known to infect humans. Four cause colds that spread easily each winter, barely noticed. Another was responsible for the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) that killed 774 people in 2003. Yet another sparked the outbreak of Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) in 2012, which kills 34% of the people who contract it, though few people do contract it.
SARS-CoV-2 (and the ensuing COVID-19 disease), the big baddie of the coronavirus family infecting humans, is the seventh. It has managed to combine the infectiousness of its cold-causing cousins with some of the lethality of SARS and MERS. It can spread before people show symptoms of disease, making it difficult to control, especially without widespread and accurate testing. And, at the moment, the ONLY effective countermeasure is physical distancing.
SARS-CoV-2 has infected more than 4.5 MILLION people around the globe, killing more than 314,500 people.
In the United States, more than 1.5 MILLION people are recognized as having the virus, and more than 90,000 have died.
As Laurie McGinley explained in her Washington Post (WaPo) article, the new virus enters the cells of people who are infected by latching onto the ACE2 receptors on cell surfaces. It unquestionably attacks the cells in the respiratory tract, but it using the same ACE2 receptor doorway to enter other cells. The gastrointestinal tract, for instance, contains 100 times more ACE2 receptors than other parts of the body, and its surface area is enormous. That’s a tremendous area for the virus to invade and replicate itself.
Once inside a cell, the virus replicates, causing chaos. ACE2 receptors, which help regulate blood pressure, are plentiful in the lungs, kidneys and intestines—organs hit hard by the pathogen in many patients. (That may explain why high blood pressure has emerges as one of the most common preexisting conditions in people who have become severely ill with COVID-19.
Cells with ACE2 receptors are almost everywhere in the body, so it makes sense that the virus would cause damage throughout the body, according to Mitchell Elkind, a professor of neurology at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons and president-elect of the American Heart Association.
Coronavirus starts as a viral infection but then becomes a more global disturbance to the immune system and blood vessels—and what kills is exactly that. COVID-19 begins as a respiratory virus and kills as a cardiovascular virus. Similar harm to other organs, like the kidneys, also leads to death.
Coronavirus homes in on more than one organ system. And that should terrify people.
The havoc the virus wreaks on blood vessels leads to clots that can range from microscopic to sizeable. Patients have suffered strokes and pulmonary emboli as clots break loose and travel to the brain and lungs. A study in the Lancet, a British medical journal, showed this may be because the virus directly targets the endothelial cells that line blood vessels.
Inflammation of those endothelial cells lining blood vessels may help explain why the virus harms so many parts of the body. That means defeating COVID-19 will require MORE than antiviral therapy.