“Lon Tweeten for TIME”

by Alice Park

“While most people are familiar with the hallmark symptoms of COVID-19 by now—cough, fever, muscle aches, headaches and difficulty breathing—a new crop of medical conditions are emerging from the more than 4 million confirmed cases of the disease around the world.

“These include skin rashes, diarrhea, kidney abnormalities and potentially life-threatening blood clots. It’s not unusual for viruses to directly infect and affect different tissues and organs in the body, but it is a bit unusual for a primarily respiratory virus like SARS-CoV-2, which is responsible for COVID-19, to have such a wide-ranging reach in the body. ‘We see a number of other viruses affect so many different organs in the body,’ says Dr. Kristin Englund, an infectious disease expert at the Cleveland Clinic. ‘But do we see influenza, or other respiratory viruses spread to so many different organs? Not usually.’

“The reports of these non-respiratory effects started to build as doctors began treating more and more patients, and much of current scientific understanding of them is still in the early stages, and not confirmed with rigorous studies.”  Continue reading this article at Time, click here.