The Story:
As clinical experience, and research results, expand it becomes ever more clear that the pandemic is for many of its patients, at least as much a vascular condition (that is, a problem with the walls of the veins and arteries) as it is a respiratory one.
Significance:
Covid-19 is often considered a close relative of influenza. That way of thinking, in turn, draws attention to the respiratory aspects of both diseases. What it may lead us to neglect, though, is that infection with the virus behind Covid causes severe damage to the endothelial cells, the lining of blood vessels, and this in turn triggers blood clotting.
Many doctors also now believe that the vascular aspect of the disease can explain many of the stranger symptoms, such as so-called “Covid toe,” discolored and swollen extremities.
In Pill Form:
Studies of the lungs autopsied from patients who died of acute respiratory stress syndrome (ARDS) at the end of a bout with the influential A virus (H1N1) did not show the distinctive patterns in the blood vessels that are the hallmark of the lungs of people who have died of Covid-19. So whatever one might want to say about this dread disease, one ought not to say that it is “a bad flu.”
