This week’s White House press room follies were only among the bizarre twists and turns in the novel coronavirus saga. Aspects of the disease keep presenting new deadly challenges for doctors and patients. It’s like living through a disaster movie without the orchestral soundtrack. And a lot less fun.
A New York Times commentary by an emergency room physician warned Sunday that “Covid pneumonia” was silently killing people, driving down their blood oxygen to life-threatening levels before they sought medical attention. Only when they began experiencing shortness of breath did they go to the hospital. By then, too late for many. This “silent hypoxia” was present among people who had no other symptoms, Dr. Richard Levitan warned.
Days later, the Washington Post reported on blood clots forming “in as many as 20, 30 or 40 percent” of COVID-19 patients:
Autopsies have shown some people’s lungs fill with hundreds of microclots. Errant blood clots of a larger size can break off and travel to the brain or heart, causing a stroke or heart attack. On Saturday, Broadway actor Nick Cordero, 41, had his right leg amputated after being infected with the novel coronavirus and suffering from clots that blocked blood from getting to his toes.
Lewis Kaplan, a University of Pennsylvania physician and head of the Society of Critical Care Medicine, said every year doctors treat people with clotting complications, from those with cancer to victims of severe trauma, “and they don’t clot like this.”
“The problem we are having is that while we understand that there is a clot, we don’t yet understand why there is a clot,” Kaplan said. “We don’t know. And therefore, we are scared.”
Last night, the Post reported doctors are seeing COVID-19 patients in their 30s and 40s suffering severe strokes from the clotting. The median age for these types of strokes is 74:
Reports of strokes in the young and middle-aged — not just at Mount Sinai, but also in many other hospitals in communities hit hard by the novel coronavirus — are the latest twist in our evolving understanding of its connected disease, covid-19. Even as the virus has infected nearly 2.8 million people worldwide and killed about 195,000 as of Friday, its biological mechanisms continue to elude top scientific minds. Once thought to be a pathogen that primarily attacks the lungs, it has turned out to be a much more formidable foe — impacting nearly every major organ system in the body.
Living through this global pandemic is like being extras in a disaster movie even as our incompetent president’s responses have come to resemble old Hollywood plots.
Hearing that UV light kills the virus, Donald Trump on Thursday wondered aloud whether doctors might find a way to “hit the body” with UV or a powerful light to kill it, perhaps even from the inside.
In “Operation — Annihilate!” (1967), an alien parasite had driven inhabitants of the planet Deneva mad. The crew of the starship Enterprise investigates. Spock gets infected, but his Vulcan discipline helps control the creature inside him. Dr. McCoy uses high-intensity light to kill the parasite just like the acting president suggested on Thursday.
Perhaps, we could introduce the light from inside the body? Trump mused aloud to stunned medical experts and reporters.
That was the plot of the 1966 film, Fantastic Voyage. A vital Cold War scientist is comatose with an inoperable blood clot in his brain. Scientists shrink a research submarine to microscopic size and inject it into the man’s blood stream. There the crew must race against time to navigate to the clot and use a laser rifle to clear it.
“Maybe you can, maybe you can’t,” the acting president said. “I’m not a doctor. But I’m, like, a person that has a good you-know-what,” Trump said, pointing to his head. Upon hearing that household disinfectants can kill COVID-19, he suggested maybe you could inject a disinfectant into the body to kill the virus.
Manufacturers of Lysol and Clorox rushed out warnings for people not to inject themselves with nor to ingest their cleaning products.
That was no crazed Sterno-bum recommending using UV light and cleaning products internally, but the incompetent President of the United States. Then again, an aging Sterno bum and an infant were the only survivors when an alien pathogen kills off everyone in a small desert town in The Andromeda Strain (1971). Donald Trump simply combines them into one character in the remake.
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Note: The pandemic will upend standard field tactics in 2020. If enough promising “improvisations” come my way by June, perhaps I can issue a COVID-19 supplement.