No Rush, Covid-19 Isn't Just Like the Common Cold

Coronavirus isn't the flu on steroids or as Rush Limbaugh says, just a media hyped version of the common cold. It appears to be a much more insidious disease that attacks people in multiple different ways.  A majority of hospitalize patients have classic advanced flu symptoms - respiratory congestion moving rapidly to pneumonia.   However, there is another range of symptoms that effect almost all of the body's critical organs and some very scary blood related symptoms that are truly frightening.  Another chilling factor of the disease is the rapidity with which it attacks the respiratory system - moving from modest symptoms to respiratory failure in hours.  Doctors and researchers are learning more about Covid-19 every day, but they aren't sure yet why the disease effects different people in so many different ways.

...For lay people like most of us the original story was that COVID19 was a viral respiratory tract infection. It was more deadly, less predictable in its course and had no known therapies to treat it. But broadly speaking a disease that attack the lungs, leads in severe cases to pneumonia and from there a cascading series of failures that can lead to death. Doctors had a more sophisticated but broadly comparable understanding. Four months plus into the history of the disease they know that COVID19 can attack most of the body’s major organs – heart, liver, kidneys, brain, et al. It’s far more insidious and copious in its range of potential attacks on the human body than they realized only six weeks ago.

A new emerging issue is how COVID19 attacks or disrupts a patient’s blood – specifically the delicate and critical balance of regulating when to flow and when to clot. When I first read articles about this I assumed these clotting issues were just part and parcel of the failure or near failure of the various organ systems. COVID19 attacks your liver or kidneys and clotting issues are just a manifestation of injury. But that does not seem to be the case. It seems to be a distinct way COVID19 attacks the body.