BREAKING! Mount Sinai Medical Experts Report COVID-19 Patient With Rare Symptoms And Warns Of Possibility Of More Such Cases
COVID-19: Medical experts from Mount Sinai Hospital-New York have reported of rare symptoms and manifestations in a COVID-19 patient and have published a study about the case in the Lancet journal so that doctors elsewhere can take note of such occurrences.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanres/article/PIIS2213-2600(20)30232-0/fulltext
The medical experts from Mount Sinai said scans of the patient’s lungs indicated a fungal invasion, tests showed no telltale sign of the SARS-Cov-2 coronavirus in the upper respiratory tract but the patient had an immune response called a cytokine storm within just hours of the disease’s onset.
Dr Timothy Harkin from Mount Sinai Hospital’s pulmonary division told Thailand Medical News, “For a disease that was unknown only five months ago, it might be too early for clinicians to be certain of which manifestations are typical.”
The case involved a 34-year-old male patient who was an anesthesiologist in otherwise good health. The patient initially tested positive for influenza A and the symptoms disappeared following a routine treatment.
However after more than 10 days’ rest, the patient returned to work at a medical center in the city only to suddenly fall very ill that afternoon and be admitted to the emergency department at Mount Sinai Hospital.
The manifesting symptoms included fever, chills and shortness of breath. The individual also developed a cytokine storm, a life-threatening condition in which the immune system attacks healthy cells.
Dr Harkin said diagnostic tests involving a nasal sample from the patient came back negative for Covid-19.
It was reported that the patient’s symptoms quickly improved after the individual was given some antibiotics and other standard treatment for a lung infection.
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However on the fifth day the patient’s condition worsened again. Medication was administered but without clinical improvement.
The patients’s lung scan showed a halo-like sign of inflammation in the right lung, which radiologists suggested could be a fungal infection.
Significantly, the inflammation imaging was not characteristic of previously reported CT findings for Covid-19.
The medical team however suspected that the patient might have Covid-19 and the patient was tested for the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus again on the seventh day. These tests also returned negative results.
The medical expert team at Mount Sinai decided to get a sample using a method known as bronchoalveolar lavage (BAL).
Bronchoalveolar lavage involves inserting a tube in a patient’s lung to extract fluids and tissues. It is a costly, time-consuming and uncomfortable procedure and is not widely used in the United States, with the American Association for Bronchology and Interventional Pulmonology opposing its use in Covid-19 testing in all but extreme cases.
However medical researchers in China have previously said that the approach can increase the accuracy of viral detection to more than 90 per cent compared with about 60 per cent for nasal swabs and 30 per cent for oral swabs.
Importantly, the New York patient’s BAL test was positive. By the time the patient learned that he had Covid-19, he had already spent nine days in hospital. He was still sick, but his condition had stabilized to a certain degree.
The patient was subsequently reported as his cough and myalgias slowly being resolved, and that he had no fever higher than 37.8 degrees Celsius.
The medical researchers were struck by several unusual presentations in the patient’s symptoms.
Significantly, he developed a cytokine storm within a few hours of the disease’s onset, something that rarely happens so quickly.
The medical experts were also puzzled by the absence of the novel coronavirus in the upper respiratory samples even at the peak of infection, adding that this could be the result of a previous medication.
The individual had been taking drugs on a regular basis for pre-exposure prevention of HIV, an occupational hazard for doctors in New York.
This unique patient case adds to the anomalies about the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus.
Certain patients in China, for example, tested negative to an oral swab but positive in anal samples. Researchers also found viral strains hidden deep inside the lung of a patient who had recovered.
Certain medical researchers say that the anomalies are the result of an inadequate understanding of the interaction between the newSARS-CoV-2 coronavirus and our immune system, while others suspect that the virus might have mutated and it is those new strains are causing symptoms different from those reported in earlier cases.
Whatever the case might be, the medical researchers from Mount Sinai are advising and warning all doctors elsewhere to look out for anomalies and such occurrences could happen or are already happening in patients elsewhere.
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