iNDICA NEWS BUREAU-
The coronavirus isn’t just a respiratory infection.
As days pass doctors come to learn more new things about the novel coronavirus. In fresh new findings on what makes COVID-19 so severe for some patients, they have discovered a mysterious and potentially lethal complication of the disease: blood clots.
Doctors around the world have been reporting an alarming number of gel-like clumps, in the blood that can cause serious problems, such as heart attack and stroke, according to news reports.
“The number of clotting problems I’m seeing in the ICU, all related to COVID-19, is unprecedented,” Dr. Jeffrey Laurence, a hematologist at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City, told CNN.
Many doctors are coming to realize that COVID-19 is no ordinary respiratory disease. The virus is killing people by ravaging the circulatory system.
What the doctors have been finding strange is that while some patients appear to breathe freely their bodies were alarmingly starved of oxygen. They’d never seen anything like it except in patients with extreme altitude sickness.
Some doctors started to notice that the patients were developing clots in their legs, even while they were on blood thinners, according to The Washington Post. Others reported trouble with dialysis machines for COVID-19 patients because clots in the patients’ blood would clog the machine tubing, according to CNN.
Lewis Kaplan, a physician at the University of Pennsylvania and head of the Society of Critical Care Medicine, “The problem we are having is that while we understand that there is a clot, we don’t yet understand why there is a clot, he said. “We don’t know. And therefore, we are scared.”
Some doctors suspect that could be the result of an overactive immune system, which leads to an imbalance in “clotting factors” that can cause clotting or bleed, the Post reported.
But they note that many COVID-19 patients in the ICU also have other risk factors for blood clots, such as diabetes, heart disease, and high blood pressure, according to CNN.
Doctors say there is an urgent need to study this issue and whether blood thinners can help COVID-19 patients, CNN reported.
