The list of mysterious symptoms related to the coronavirus is getting longer.
The latest unexpected side effect occurred in an 86-year-old woman in Italy whose fingers turned black with gangrene as COVID-19 caused severe clotting and cut off blood flow to her limbs.
Doctors were forced to amputate three of her digits after diagnosing the woman in April 2020. They called the case study a “severe manifestation” of the disease in a new report published in the European Journal of Vascular & Endovascular Surgery.
Doctors were already aware that the coronavirus can wreak havoc on the vascular system, but they are not yet sure why. Currently, many in the medical community believe that the side effect may be related to an increasingly common overreaction of the immune system to COVID-19, a so-called “cytokine storm,” which prompts the body to attack diseased cells as well as healthy tissues.
The medical community continues to discover new, unexpected conditions of the disease – as the US approaches 27 million cases this week since the March 2020 outbreak, according to data from the World Health Organization. While many experience conditions similar to the 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 of Disease Control and prevention.
Even a year after the pandemic, scientists are still pinpointing unexpected symptoms. Last week, King’s College London researcher Tim Spector, a professor of genetic epidemiology, revealed that One in five COVID-19 patients report less common ailments, such as a rash, mouth sores, and an enlarged tongue, which are not included in the CDC’s list of symptoms.
Spector’s speculation comes through data collected by the UK’s ZOE COVID Symptom Study, which encourages Britons to self-report what they experience during an infection. Spector told USA Today last week that “COVID tongue,” in which the tongues of coronavirus patients inexplicably swell, is one of the rarest symptoms he has seen, “affecting less than 1 in 100 people,” he estimated.