Alert date November 21, 2022

Covid 19 Related Resource

Contact: PLEASE YOU DO NOT WANT TO GET INFECTED OR RE-INFECTED WITH THIS DISEASE. PLEASE MASK UP- (BOTH INSIDE AND OUTSIDE) – WASH YOUR HANDS – SANITIZE – WASH YOUR BODY – SOCIAL DISTANCE

Not everyone who gets COVID-19 will suffer serious blood vessel inflammation, but the disease is still something of a roll of the dice — or, as physician Ziyad Al-Aly puts it, Russian roulette. That doesn’t mean people should despair or panic. Early treatment can save lives, which is why doctors urge people who’ve been infected not to ignore any warning sign, even if they weren’t previously at any known risk.

Al-Aly, who works at the Veterans Affairs St. Louis Health Care System, was one of the first doctors to jump into studying long COVID and, more generally, the aftermath of infection. “Something about SARS-CoV-2 increases propensity to damaging the lining of the blood vessels and increases the probability of blood clotting,” he said.

“What makes this such a dangerous disease is mainly that it attacks these vessels,” said Pascal Jabbour, a neurosurgeon at Thomas Jefferson Hospital in Philadelphia. The disease can lead to inflammation in blood vessels all over the body, he said, including the gut, causing a condition called bowel ischemia. It’s also at the root of a circulatory problem known as COVID-19 toes.

REMEMBER FROM PART ONE?

The study also showed that those who got infected but were not sick enough to be hospitalized were still 10 times more likely to die of any cause during the study period than their uninfected counterparts. People who’d been hospitalized for COVID-19 were about 100 times more likely to die during the study period.

Another new study published in Neurosurgery focused on the period when people were actively infected, and concluded that COVID-19 infection was associated with strokes — and that strokes that occurred in infected people were likely to be more severe and harder to treat with surgery.