The respiratory virus which causes Covid-19 causes nausea in some, loss of the sense for smell in others, and even acute kidney injury.
With the pandemic being the culprit for 500,000 deaths worldwide as of late June, the symptom list has exploded too.
The CDC is updating the list constantly in an effort to help clinicians detect the cases easier, a major diagnostic tool when the swab tests were lacking and took days to return the results.
According to Dan Negoianu from Penn Medicine, a nephrologist, for a lot of illnesses, it may require years before the various ways in which it influences people are detected.
Even now, they’re still in the early phase of understanding this illness.
Covid-19 Doesn’t just Damage the Lungs
According to Thomas McGinn, deputy physician in chief in the Northwell Health and the director of the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research, the coronavirus has multiple effects on various organs and it keeps them up at night.
It affects the body in so many different ways, says McGinn.
Clinicians aren’t sure why the new virus is able to cause a mess from head to toe.
Patients with severe Covid-19 can experience clot formation, explains the infectious disease physician Rochelle Walensky from the Massachusetts General Hospital.
This may trigger symptoms like low intestinal blood flow and red inflamed, so-called ‘covid toe’.
Walensky adds that they had 5 patients whose guts had to be removed.
Moreover, in addition to the gut, Covid-19 can also cause havoc in the kidneys-scientists studied 1000 Covid-19 patients in a New York hospital and found that 78 percent of them had acute kidney injury in the ICU.
The loss of the senses of taste or smell or both are also a common symptom-in an analysis of 24 studies from 8438 covid-19 patients from 13 different countries, 41 percent lost it.
For Fabio Ferreli from the Humanitas University in Milan, this isn’t surprising as the highest level of the ACE2 receptors are in the nasal cells.
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This sensory loss isn’t a result of an inflammation, congestion or swelling in the nasal area, but a result of a direct damage to these cells.