General Discussion

VOX

(22,976 posts) Wed Apr 15, 2020, 03:41 PM Apr 2020

Coronavirus destroys lungs. But doctors are finding its damage in kidneys, hearts and elsewhere.

Trump can dig in his tiny spurs all he wants, but until this *serious* virus is fully figured out by science and medicine, sheltering-in-place remains vital.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.washingtonpost.com/health/coronavirus-destroys-lungs-but-doctors-are-finding-its-damage-in-kidneys-hearts-and-elsewhere/2020/04/14/7ff71ee0-7db1-11ea-a3ee-13e1ae0a3571_story.html%3foutputType=amp
Washington Post
April 15, 2020
By Lenny Bernstein, Carolyn Y. Johnson, Sarah Kaplan and Laurie McGinley

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 the treatment of 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.

Even more alarming, he added, is early data that shows 14 to 30 percent of intensive-care patients in New York and Wuhan, China — birthplace of the pandemic — losing kidney function and requiring 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 continuous renal therapy, he said.
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