Source: COVID-19 Questions May 07, 2020 4 years, 6 months, 1 week, 13 hours, 35 minutes ago
COVID-19 Questions: Many doctors and others on the front lines are being faced with mounting perplexing symptoms and the COVID-19 disease itself has unpredictable effects on various people. There are many unanswered questions that people are asking and we kick off this series which will be featured every week.
New reports suggests that patients experience low oxygen saturation days before they appear in the ER. If so, is there a way to treat patients earlier?
In reality even before symptoms arise, people infected with SARS-CoV-2 show damage to their lungs. This is likely why low oxygen saturation that is, below-normal oxygen levels in their blood occurs before the patient goes to the ER. Restoring those levels to normal is presumed, though not proven, to be beneficial; giving patients supplemental oxygen via a nasal cannula, a flexible tube that delivers oxygen, placed just inside the nostrils, will restore oxygen to normal levels unless disease worsens to the extent that mechanical ventilation is needed.
https://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/laninf/PIIS1473-3099(20)30086-4.pdf and
https://www.thailandmedical.news/news/breaking-news-covid-19-alerts-british-doctors-warns-of-new-anomaly-of-covid-19-patients-appearing-normal-despite-suffering-from-severe-hypoxia
It has been observed that young adults are having strokes with COVID-19. Does this suggest the illness is more of a vascular disease than a lung disease in that age group?
The disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus can be a devastating disease to multiple organs and systems in the body, including the vascular and immune systems. A lung infection is the primary cause of disease and death. There are examples of the clotting system being activated and causing strokes, perhaps caused by an immune system responding abnormally to COVID-19.
https://shaleklab.com/publication/SARS-cov-2-receptor-ace2-is-an-interferon-stimulated-gene-in-human-airway-epithelial-cells-and-is-detected-in-specific-cell-subsets-across-tissues/ and
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/368/6490/473/tab-pdf and
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/368/6490/473/tab-e-letters
The US CDC recently updated its official list of symptoms. Does this suggest anything unusual about COVID-19?
This new information is due to a greater number of infected individuals being studied. The update simply reflects a better understanding of the full spectrum of
illness due to COVID-19, from asymptomatic to presymptomatic to severe and fatal infections.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/symptoms-testing/symptoms.html
Why is it that so many people can experience such mild symptoms and others quickly die from it?
One of the most fascinating aspects of these diseases is the huge difference that individuals experience with an infection. After an infection of SARS-CoV-2, the severity of the illness is likely due in part to how the patient's immune system responds; an overzealous immune response may cause death through what is called colloquially a "cytokine storm." We do not know yet if cytokine storms occur more in one group than another for example, older versus younger.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/04/how-does-coronavirus-kill-clinicians-trace-ferocious-rampage-through-body-brain-toes
It has been observed that besides the lungs, the disease appears now to affect various other organs like heart and kidney and even the gastrointestinal tract. What does this suggest?
What we know most clearly is that infection starts only in human cells with the ACE2 receptor—that is, in a cell that is capable of receiving the virus. That is present not only in the lungs, but in other cells as well, including those in the intestine and in the nasal mucosa, which lines the nasal cavity. When those cells are infected, the immune system is activated. A consequence is that both the heart and kidney are affected.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32338224
It has been observed some countries are not experiencing as much impact from Global COVID-19 pandemic as compared to the US, Europe and China. Why is this so?
It is too early in the pandemic to know if certain countries or populations are relatively less susceptible. The younger overall age of a population could be a primary factor. Or perhaps the virus, so far at least, has not had time to spread more widely in these countries.
If you have any interesting
COVID-19 questions you like to ask, send it through the contact forms on the site and we will answer them weekly.
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