The Coronavirus appears to cause long-term health problems for survivors…
~
The new coronavirus kills by inflaming and clogging the tiny air sacs in the lungs, choking off the body’s oxygen supply until it shuts down the organs essential for life.
But clinicians around the world are seeing evidence that suggests the virus also may be causing heart inflammation, acute kidney disease, neurological malfunction, blood clots, intestinal damage and liver problems.
That development has complicated treatment for the most severe cases of Covid-19, the illness caused by the virus, and makes the course of recovery less certain, they said.
The prevalence of these effects is too great to attribute them solely to the “cytokine storm”, a powerful immune-system response that attacks the body, causing severe damage, doctors and researchers said.
Almost half the people hospitalised because of Covid-19 have blood or protein in their urine, indicating early damage to their kidneys, said Alan Kliger, a Yale University School of Medicine nephrologist who co-chairs a task force assisting dialysis patients who have Covid-19.
Even more alarming, he added, is early data that shows 14 to 30 per cent of intensive-care patients in New York and Wuhan, China – birthplace of the pandemic – have lost kidney function and require dialysis, or its in-hospital cousin, continuous renal replacement therapy.
New York intensive care units are treating so much kidney failure, he said, they need more personnel who can perform dialysis and have issued an urgent call for volunteers from other parts of the country.
They also are running dangerously short of the sterile fluids used to deliver that therapy, he said.
It’s not just outright death that is the issue….
The Coronavirus appears to cause long-term health problems for survivors…
~
The new coronavirus kills by inflaming and clogging the tiny air sacs in the lungs, choking off the body’s oxygen supply until it shuts down the organs essential for life.
But clinicians around the world are seeing evidence that suggests the virus also may be causing heart inflammation, acute kidney disease, neurological malfunction, blood clots, intestinal damage and liver problems.
That development has complicated treatment for the most severe cases of Covid-19, the illness caused by the virus, and makes the course of recovery less certain, they said.
The prevalence of these effects is too great to attribute them solely to the “cytokine storm”, a powerful immune-system response that attacks the body, causing severe damage, doctors and researchers said.
Almost half the people hospitalised because of Covid-19 have blood or protein in their urine, indicating early damage to their kidneys, said Alan Kliger, a Yale University School of Medicine nephrologist who co-chairs a task force assisting dialysis patients who have Covid-19.
Even more alarming, he added, is early data that shows 14 to 30 per cent of intensive-care patients in New York and Wuhan, China – birthplace of the pandemic – have lost kidney function and require dialysis, or its in-hospital cousin, continuous renal replacement therapy.
New York intensive care units are treating so much kidney failure, he said, they need more personnel who can perform dialysis and have issued an urgent call for volunteers from other parts of the country.
They also are running dangerously short of the sterile fluids used to deliver that therapy, he said.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/coronavirus-symptoms-lung-kidney-heart-covid-19-us-doctors-a9466701.html