By Peter Wark
We’re now all too familiar with the common symptoms of Covid-19: a fever, dry cough and fatigue. Some people also experience aches and pains, a sore throat, and loss of taste or smell.
Sufferers with mild illness might expect to get better after a few weeks. But there’s mounting evidence this isn’t the case, and Covid-19 may leave a long-lasting impression on its victims – not just the most severely affected or the elderly and frail.
It’s not just an infection of the lungs
On the surface, Covid-19 is a lung disease. The SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus infects cells of the respiratory tract and can cause life-threatening pneumonia.
However, the full range of symptoms affects multiple parts of the body. An app that records daily symptoms developed at King’s College London has tracked the progress of more than 4 million Covid-19 patients in the United Kingdom, Sweden and the United States.
Besides the well-described symptoms of fever, cough and loss of smell are other effects, including fatigue, rash, headache, abdominal pain and diarrhea. People who develop more severe forms of the disease also report confusion, severe muscle pains, cough and shortness of breath.
About 20 percent of those infected with Covid-19 require hospitalization to treat their pneumonia, and many need assistance with oxygen. In about 5 percent of cases the pneumonia becomes so severe patients are admitted to intensive care for breathing support.
Photo Credit: Reuters / TPG Images
It trips the immune system
People with severe Covid-19 seem to show an altered immune response even in the disease’s early stages. They have fewer circulating immune cells, which fail to efficiently control the virus, and instead suffer an exaggerated inflammatory response (the “cytokine storm“).
This is increasingly recognized as one of the main factors that makes the disease so serious in some patients. Suppressing this exaggerated response with the immunosuppressant dexamethasone remains the only treatment that reduces death rates in those who require oxygen support or intensive care.
Patients with severe Covid-19 describe a fa
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2020-07-27 05:22:16Z
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