Scientists don’t know exactly what’s going on, but some doctors are calling the condition Covid pneum

The condition has been called silent hypoxia and resembles the low oxygen levels a person suffers when breathing the thin air at high altitudes. These people are in critical condition, though they don’t realize it. (X-rays reveal their air sacs in the lungs are filled with fluid or pus.) The low oxygen levels, untreated, can quickly cascade into serious breathing problems and damage to other organs.

Scientists don’t know exactly what’s going on, but some doctors are calling the condition Covid pneumonia. Autopsies of a small number of people who died from Covid-19 find, because of all the water, lungs weighing more than four pounds, and in one case seven and a half pounds, compared to the normal average of under two pounds.

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Blood clots
Only recently have doctors realized that Covid-19 seems to be infecting blood and damaging blood vessels. In one study, 31% of people in intensive care with Covid pneumonia had blood clots. These clots, which the body creates in an effort to stop bleeding, can break up and travel to the lungs or cut off blood flow to the brain, causing a stroke.

“Blood thinners don’t reliably prevent clotting in people with Covid-19, and young people are dying of strokes caused by the blockages in the brain,” science writer Cassandra Willyard notes in a review of the early research on the topic for the journal Nature.

The presence of blood clots can be indicated by levels of protein fragments from the clot, called D-dimer. Doctors are seeing unusually high D-dimer levels in many Covid-19 patients.

“We’ve never seen such high levels before,” says Salata, the Case Western physician. One woman recently had levels that were “just not heard of before,” he said. He and his colleagues are finding major clots as well as unusual numbers of smaller clots that can damage the heart, lungs, kidneys, and other organs.

Inflammatory syndrome in children
In late April and early May, a mysterious toxic shock syndrome began showing up in children in various countries, causing at least three deaths in New York. Some cases have been firmly tied to Covid-19 diagnoses; others have not.

The symptoms of pediatric multisystem inflammatory syndrome, as it’s being called, resemble an unrelated syndrome called Kawasaki disease, a leading cause of heart disease in children. Both are marked by high fever, rash, cracked lips, and bloodshot eyes.

It’s not clear yet if Covid-19 and Kawasaki disease are perhaps occurring simultaneously, but Salata thinks the new cases are probably yet another severe immune-system reaction to Covid-19 that only looks like Kawasaki disease. “We don’t know for sure,” Salata says, “but that’s what it really looks like.”

Loss of smell and taste
The loss of smell, called anosmia, can be caused by the common cold, when congestion mucks up nose and nasal passages. Other diseases can trigger anosmia by disrupting or killing the olfactory nerves high in the nasal cavity.

But doctors were surprised earlier this year when people with anosmia and no other symptoms, or only mild symptoms, tested positive for Covid-19. It’s not yet certain how Covid-19 triggers anosmia, but remember those receptor cells that readily receive the coronavirus, present in the lungs and elsewhere? Similar cells exist in the olfactory epithelium, a layer of skin containing the neurons that detect scents.