As the coronavirus pandemic continues, new symptoms are showing and one of them is damaging blood clots. Doctors around the world are not noticing clotting-related disorders, from "COVID toe" to strokes and blood-vessel blockages. If these dangerous blood clots go untreated, they may appear days or months after the respiratory symptoms have been treated.
According to Mitchell Levy, chief of pulmonary critical care and sleep medicine at the Warren Albert School of Medicine at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, the blood clotting phenomenon is one of the most important things that has been recorded over the last few months.
Blood clots are not uncommon for infections. The 1918 Spanish flu pandemic was also recorded blood clots. Viruses including dengue, HIV, and Ebola are all known to make blood cells prone to clumping. Levy said that there is something about the virus that is exaggerating the blood clotting to a higher degree and experts are now seeing it in a way that they have never seen before in other illnesses.
Fast Deterioration
The problem is in clots that form in the arterial catheters and filters of the patients' as those are used to support failing kidneys. There are also clots that impede blood flow in the lungs, thus causing it difficult to breathe. According to Margaret Pisani, an associate professor of medicine at the Yale University School of Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut, these are probably what is causing patients to suddenly fall off the ledge and develop severe blood-oxygen deficiency.
Researchers in China were the first ones to notice clotting disorders in COVID-19 patients, but their gravity has since become clearer. While there are doctors who had thought that the vast majority of lung damage was because of viral pneumonia, they are now looking more closely at clotting.
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There are separate studies from the Netherlands and France that stated that as many as 30% of severely ill COVID-19 patients suffered a pulmonary embolism. These usually happen when bits of blood clots from veins deep in the legs travel to the lungs. The prevalence of pulmonary embolism was 1.3% in critically ill patients without COVID-19.
Cardiac Arrest
If blood clots are left untreated, the large arterial lung clots can put an overwhelming strain on the heart and it can cause cardiac arrest. Even tiny clots in the capillaries of lung tissue may interrupt blood flow, undermining attempts to help oxygenate patients with ventilators.
Organ Damage
Blood clots can also damage vital organs including the heart, liver, kidneys, bowel, and other tissues if they form in other parts of the body. In COVID-19 patients that are pregnant, clots may impair blood supply to the fetus and it can lead to complications linked with miscarriages and low birth weight.
There have been five cases of stroke in Manhattan's Mount Sinai Health System over a two-week period through early April. The patients, who all had the coronavirus and were below 50 years old, were treated for large-vessel blockages.
Some doctors are now starting to see COVID-19 as less of respiratory disease and more of one that involves dangerous clotting. This worries health experts as they still have no idea what they are up against until in the later stage of the illness.
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