Saturday, March 28, 2020

How the Coronavirus Attacks Your Body

Scientists are still studying what happens in the body when someone gets infected and how the virus in some patients progresses to the lungs, causing viral pneumonia, difficulty breathing, and even death.

Doctors have been forced to learn much about how the virus works as they go.

Once the virus starts infecting the cells that line the air sacs in the lungs, viral pneumonia develops, which is inflammation of the lungs.

Adam Bernheim, a cardiothoracic radiologist at the Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, and co-researchers studied the chest CT chest scans of 121 positive coronavirus patients from China.

Patients need assistance breathing because there's no therapy to treat ARDS. "The ventilator is buying time for the lung to repair itself after a virus has run its course and the immune system response has calmed down," says Dr. Garibaldi.

Chest X-rays demonstrated pneumonia in 19 of the 21 patients, all of whom developed ARDS. Most of the patients who died were unable to maintain adequate oxygen levels due to diseased lungs.

"We don't know if the virus is doing something to the heart or the heart may have been stressed by the patient's critical illness because a lot of these patients are older and have other health problems," says Dr. Arentz.


https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-the-coronavirus-attacks-your-body-11585343549?mod=hp_lead_pos10

No comments: