9th June, 2020
The researchers said the doctors are prescribing the wrong treatment because they understand the virus infection to be a respiratory disease.
But doctors involved in the new research said the coronavirus is also a blood vessel disease, which explains why COVID-19 patients have experienced heart attacks, blood clots, and other ranging symptoms.
COVID-19, the official name for the disease caused by the new coronavirus, has been commonly described as a respiratory disease – one that primarily affects the lungs, and kills in a similar way to pneumonia.
But as doctors became more familiar with the disease, many noticed that COVID-19 patients suffered damage to a worrying range of vital organs across the body including the heart, brain and kidney.
Now, doctors say that the evidence is growing that coronavirus is also a vascular infection – one that can infect blood vessels – which would explain the range of symptoms it causes.
“All these Covid-associated complications were a mystery. We see blood clotting, we see kidney damage, we see inflammation of the heart, we see stroke, we see encephalitis [swelling of the brain],” said Dr. William Li, speaking to Medium’s Elemental+.
“A whole myriad of seemingly unconnected phenomena that you do not normally see with SARS or H1N1 or, frankly, most infectious diseases,” added Dr. Li, who is the president of the Angiogenesis Foundation, a nonprofit organisation that studies how to fight disease through the process of developing new blood vessels.
Dr. Mandeep Mehra, medical director of the Brigham and Women’s Hospital Heart and Vascular Center, told Medium that these symptoms suggest that the virus is probably a “vasculotropic virus, meaning that it affects the [blood vessels].”
“The concept that’s emerging is that this is not a respiratory illness alone, this is a respiratory illness to start with, but it is actually a vascular illness that kills people through its involvement of the vasculature,” Dr. Mehra told Medium.
Reprinted from Alarabiya