The list of mysterious symptoms related to coronavirus is getting longer and longer.
The last unexpected side effect happened to an 86-year-old woman in Italy, whose fingers went black with gangrene when COVID-19 caused severe clotting, cutting off the blood supply to her extremities.
Doctors were forced to amputate three of their fingers after diagnosing the woman in April 2020, calling the case study a “serious manifestation” of the disease in a new report published in the European Journal of Vascular & Endovascular Surgery.
Doctors already knew that coronavirus can wreak havoc on the vascular system, although they are not yet sure why. Currently, many in the medical community believe that the side effect may be related to an increasingly common immune reaction to COVID-19, called a “cytokine storm”, which causes the body to attack sick cells and healthy tissues.
The medical community continues to discover new unexpected conditions of the disease – as the United States approaches 27 million cases this week since the March 2020 outbreak, according to data from the World Health Organization. While many experience diseases similar to those associated with flu, such as fever, body aches, difficulty breathing and nasal congestion, other common warning signs include nausea and vomiting, diarrhea and a mysterious inability to taste and smell, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Even with a year of pandemic, scientists are still identifying unexpected symptoms. Last week, King’s College London researcher Tim Spector, professor of genetic epidemiology, revealed that one in five patients with COVID-19 report less common illnesses, such as skin rashes, sores in the mouth and enlarged tongue, which are not included in the CDC’s list of symptoms.
Spector’s speculation comes from data collected by the ZOE COVID symptom study in the UK, which encourages Britons to report what they experienced during an infection. Spector told USA Today last week that the “COVID language”, in which the languages of coronavirus patients swell inexplicably, is one of the rarest symptoms he has seen, “affecting less than 1 in 100 people,” he estimated.