Every Covid-19 Symptom We Know About Right Now, From Head to Toe
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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One study of 214 Covid-19 patients found 36.4% had neurological symptoms, including dizziness, headaches, impaired consciousness, and seizures.
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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,
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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.
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Some people with Covid-19 develop dangerously low levels of oxygen in their blood but otherwise don’t feel terribly sick.
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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.
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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.
“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.
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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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
