Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/04/21/new-coronavirus-symptom-found.html
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I’m sorry, but this sounds fake.
Or rather, there’s a few people with some comorbid condition and it’s getting tacked on as a symptom.
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I don’t know if fake is the best word here, but I also don’t like the lack of uncertainty in the quotes provided, like that it might be an early indication of the infection, but maybe it is not, and also that even if you don’t have this specific symptom, I can still be infected.
With a proper wording of what is happening and who is mostly affected, it can become helpful for (self-)diagnosing and start an isolation or take other measures, even if it is not helpful for all patients or not definitive.
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Is losing stereophonic hearing a symptom of covid? If so I think I have it after watching that video.
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I agree that this is sounds like one of those coincidences that someone notices and the media latches on but it falls apart under close scrutiny.
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There is an new Swiss study that finds that:
“Coronavirus attacks lining of blood vessels all over the body, Swiss study finds”
so bad circulation to the extremities could certainly be a thing.
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Damn you spellcheck
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I stubbed my toe on the leg of the couch two days ago and it left me a giant, dark purple bruise like I’ve never seen. Now I’m reading this and my mind is racing with paranoia.
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Yeah, maybe, but I have read some stuff linking infections to blood clots, so…
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It’s not a direct symptom of course I did, rather an indirect one. You get it from kicking yourself repeatedly for going outside without a mask and gloves.
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All of the articles i’ve read on this don’t state that the bruising and inflammation is 100% proven to be linked to COVID but there’s compelling data that might show its related in some way but that more studying needs to be done.
Hand waving all of that seems to miss the point that they are actively looking into it to determine what the mechanism and cause for it is.
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I read another article on this. The dermatologists who are getting more and more of these cases would love to be able to be more certain but their patients can’t access covid testing. Widespread testing is the first step for so many useful ways to identify, study, treat, and ultimately stop this virus.
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Hmm - layman’s guess that it is fungus related. Either the virus weakens the immune system causing it to succumb faster to a virus, or altering something on the skin that makes fungus grow faster.
Or it could be something else. I just want to be included.
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Well, I wouldn’t recommend it, but I’ve heard that licking toilets works.
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When I read this, I thought, “That’s just like Guillain-Barré.” Sure enough: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laneur/article/PIIS1474-4422(20)30109-5/fulltext
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It turns out that I have a personal limit to the number of weird-ass symptoms that I am willing to believe are presented by a single illness.
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What’s interesting to me after reading several books on the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic - aside from the very scary parallels to what’s happening 100 years later - are the anecdotes about how the disease manifested itself in so many strange ways and with so many different symptoms that doctors around the world argued among each other if it was even influenza at all. This argument went on even after the pandemic ended until modern forensic analysis proved it was the same virus.
It does not surprise me that mysterious symptoms are now appearing as a result of this novel virus and that it’s going to be the basis of study for years to come.
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The problem is figuring out causality. The problem is you’re usually not starting from a population of people who are totally healthy, so figuring out of a symptom is a result of your new disease or just an underlying condition is tough, especially if several people show the symptom but not everybody.
The media doesn’t help when they report on every oddity as if it were some new discovery. They just don’t appreciate how weird the world is and how common it is to find something strange that doesn’t pan out in the end.
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That’s the fascinating part from an epidemiological point of view. Like the 1918 flu, there are so many different manifestation of symptoms it’s hard to believe it’s coming from the same virus.
100 years ago, they saw patients hemorrhaging uncontrollably from their eyes, nose and ears - something we would immediately think of as Ebola today - yet is was still influenza. Autopsies found lungs completely decimated and liquefied, and some hardly touched - yet patients still died from ARDS (acute respiratory distress syndrome) nonetheless. Doctors reported patients incapacitated from excruciating joint pain believing they ware seeing another polio outbreak when it was really the virus attacking the white blood cell production in bone marrow. They found patients who died suddenly from cytokine storms (although they didn’t know what it was) within hours of first showing any symptoms to those who suffered for weeks in bed before succumbing. Yet, historical analysis still shows all of these symptoms were all caused by the same influenza strain.
If all of this sounds eerily familiar, it just demonstrates how devastating a novel virus can be against a virgin, unimmunized population. There are so many vectors for a virus like COVID-19 to attack from it really does not surprise me to hear it can also land in a person’s toes. It all depends on where and what conditions the virus attaches to - what organs or parts it is can find a toe-hold (pun intended) that determines if a person gets a relatively mild case or a more life-threatening one.
It’s very possible -likely even - that it is entirely unrelated - but based on what I’ve learned so far it also does not take a leap of imagination to believe it’s just another weird manifestation of this very strange disease.
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Last time I had something like that, I had kicked a chair by accident. Turned out it wasn’t COVID; I had broken my toe. 
