Among the many strange and unexpected symptoms of COVID-19, the UK’s leading professor recently highlighted another lesser known symptom of the infection that affects a person’s mouth: the “COVID tongue”.
Professor Tim Spector, a genetic epidemiologist at King’s College London, tweeted a photo of the tongue of an anonymous person covered with unusual white patches, which he calls the “COVID language”.
As Spector notes, the “COVID language” is not listed on any of Public Health England’s official symptom lists for COVID-19. There is also no mention of oral symptoms in the main symptoms listed by the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or the World Health Organization. However, he argues that it can be an important sign that you have the infection and need to stay in home to isolate.
“One in five people with Covid still has less common symptoms that do not appear on the official PHE [Public Health England] list – like rashes ”, Professor Spector tweeted on Wednesday. “I see an increasing number of Covid tongues and strange mouth ulcers. If you have a strange symptom or even just a headache and fatigue, stay home! “
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Professor Spector is leading the ZOE COVID Symptom Study app, which allows people to sign up and report any of their COVID-19 symptoms if they become infected. With more than 4.5 million people contributing data globally, the app is part of one of the largest ongoing studies in the world on COVID-19 and hopes to provide a new scientific understanding of the various symptoms that the virus causes in different people .
This is not the first time that COVID-19 has been associated with symptoms of the tongue and mouth. Research published in the journal Nature Evidence-based dentistry in June 2020, he detailed three patients with COVID-19 who had oral ulceration or blisters in the mouth, probably as a result of their infection. Another study, published in JAMA Dermatology analyzed 21 patients with COVID-19 in Spain who had skin rashes and found that six individuals (29 percent) also had oral rashes, looking like small red spots inside the mouth. In most of the cases studied, oral symptoms did not appear to be associated with any medication that patients were taking, which led the researchers to conclude that it was a symptom of COVID-19 infection.
Other studies have also shown that the virus that causes COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2, is capable of directly infecting the mouth. Pre-press paper, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, explains that the researchers detected a SARS-CoV-2 in the salivary glands and mucosa of people with COVID-19.
There have even been unconfirmed reports of people with COVID-19 who have lost their teeth, although IFLScience spoke to a dentist who was skeptical that the infection was primarily responsible for falling teeth.