A reader sent in a story from Reuters reporting that doctors are seeing blood clotting in Covid-19 patients. Excerpt:

Signs of blood thickening and clotting were being detected in different organs by doctors from different specialties. This would turn out to be one of the alarming ways the virus ravages the body, as doctors there and elsewhere were starting to realize.

At Mount Sinai, nephrologists noticed kidney dialysis catheters getting plugged with clots. Pulmonologists monitoring COVID-19 patients on mechanical ventilators could see portions of lungs were oddly bloodless. Neurosurgeons confronted a surge in their usual caseload of strokes due to blood clots, the age of victims skewing younger, with at least half testing positive for the virus.

Well, guess what? That’s only the tip of the iceberg. Here’s David Wallace-Wells’s terrifying report from New York magazine, detailing how we are six months into this thing (that is, from the first moment it was detected in Wuhan), and we still don’t know how it works. Excerpts:

Early in the epidemic, the coronavirus was seen as a variant of a familiar family of disease, not a mysterious ailment, however infectious and concerning. But while uncertainties at the population level confuse and frustrate public-health officials, unsure when and in what form to shift gears out of lockdowns, the disease has proved just as mercurial at the clinical level, with doctors revising their understanding of COVID-19’s basic pattern and weaponry — indeed often revising that understanding in different directions at once. The clinical shape of the disease, long presumed to be a relatively predictable respiratory infection, is getting less clear by the week. Lately, it seems, by the day. As Carl Zimmer, probably the country’s most respected science journalist, asked virologists in a tweet last week, “is there any other virus out there that is this weird in terms of its range of symptoms?”

You probably have a sense of the range of common symptoms, and a sense that the range isn’t that weird: fever, dry cough, and shortness of breath have been, since the beginning of the outbreak, the familiar, oft-repeated group of tell-tale signs. But while the CDC does list fever as the top symptom of COVID-19, so confidently that for weeks patients were turned away from testing sites if they didn’t have an elevated temperature, according to the Journal of the American Medical Association, as many as 70 percent of patients sick enough to be admitted to New York State’s largest hospital system did not have a fever.

The piece catalogs all the weird and horrible ways the virus is affecting people. And it may be mutating monstrously:

A couple of days later, in a pre-print paper others questioned, scientists reported finding that the ability of the disease to mutate has been “vastly underestimated” — investigating the disease as it appeared in just 11 patients, they said they found 30 mutations. “The most aggressive strains could generate 270 times as much viral load as the weakest type,” the South China Morning-Post reported. “These strains also killed the cells the fastest.”

More:

It’s not unheard of, of course, for a disease to express itself in complicated or hard-to-parse ways, attacking or undermining the functioning of a variety of organs. And it’s common, as researchers and doctors scramble to map the shape of a new disease, for their understanding to evolve quite quickly. But the degree to which doctors and scientists are, still, feeling their way, as though blindfolded, toward a true picture of the disease cautions against any sense that things have stabilized, given that our knowledge of the disease hasn’t even stabilized. Perhaps more importantly, it’s a reminder that the coronavirus pandemic is not just a public-health crisis but a scientific one as well. And that as deep as it may feel we are into the coronavirus, with tens of thousands dead and literally billions in precautionary lockdown, we are still in the very early stages, when each new finding seems as likely to cloud or complicate our understanding of the coronavirus as it is to clarify it. Instead, confidence gives way to uncertainty.

This quote, taken from Science magazine:

“Despite the more than 1,000 papers now spilling into journals and onto preprint servers every week,” Science concluded, “a clear picture is elusive, as the virus acts like no pathogen humanity has ever seen.”

Read the whole New York article. Seriously, do — it’s jaw-dropping. This thing is going to be with us a very, very long time. It will change everything. Whatever plans you and I had for our lives, they’re all up in the air now.

That line: “the virus acts like no pathogen humanity has ever seen.” I know that there is no proof (yet) that this thing didn’t escape from that Wuhan lab, despite the concern US officials expressed privately two years ago, after a visit to that lab. Still, a pathogen that is unlike any humanity has ever seen? Is it more likely that this came out of wet markets, or a Chinese bioweapons lab?

UPDATE: From Wyoming Doc:

I will paraphrase my Infectious Disease professor from 30 years ago ( he was a world wide expert – his book was carried around by medical students and house staff for generations ) – YOU ALL WILL LIVE TO SEE AN AIRBORNE PANDEMIC – I JUST HOPE FOR THE WORLD’S SAKE IT IS NOT A CORONAVIRUS.

I did not fully understand what he meant then – but I am beginning to get the picture. It is becoming increasingly clear to me that this virus is far more effective at disrupting social/economic/cultural life than most of our actual biologic lives. It has been clear from the beginning that maybe up to 10% of us – and that is a stretch – will get very ill and this is still true. Do not get me wrong – I have first hand experience with this virus in multiple patients now – this virus is a demon from hell when it gets hold of someone. But it, like various other infectious diseases, has not only a medical detonation – but a cultural one as well. At this point – we are not certain which will be worse.

This article referenced in the New York Magazine is accurate – but the presentation leaves the reader open to scaremongering and panic.

Coronaviruses as a family have been known to be unique and different for the last several decades. This is just the way they are. The way they interact with our immune system is completely unique – and the normal things we physicians do for infections – both diagnosis and therapy – antibody testing, vaccines, etc – are not going to work very well with them. Two other coronaviruses are some of the common viruses that cause the common cold. They are completely out of our control. They do not respond to any vaccine that has been put to them. They do not generate a normal antibody response in our immune system. I knew these facts thirty years ago when I was a medical student – the author of this piece is acting like this is new information for this family – it most definitely is not. In brief – all of our medical science that we have relied on for decades is simply a very blunt tool for this epidemic. We in medicine have a lot of work to do – and it is not clear if some of these issues will ever be resolved.

Secondly – one of the most important things to realize about pandemics – they most often involve NOVEL agents – things we have never seen before. NOVEL agents do NOVEL things. I can confirm many of the problems this author discusses – the blood clotting, heart attacks and heart failure, and the vivid dreams and hallucinations are very unusual – as is the lack of consistent febrile response. We in health care find these things scary or concerning – until we have a biochemical or physiologic reason for them – and then they become old hat. I am going to find it very interesting the next few months/years as all of these things are worked out. Now – we just have to understand that any or all of these things can happen and keep them in the back of our minds at all times. I would remind your readers that are old enough that the very same thing happened with HIV.

The last thing I would urge you Rod – is not to use the word “BIO-WEAPON” – that is a much different connotation than the word “MAN-MADE”. I would remind you of the word “DISINFECTANT” – it has all sorts of meanings that the President probably did not mean either.

If this was a BIOWEAPON – it was done by complete incompetent morons. Say what you will about the CCP – they are not morons.

1) This is far too contagious a virus to be a good bioweapon – you are just as likely to obtain an “onside goal” as to hurt your enemy – ie WUHAN. This kind of contagiousness would make a great bioweapon for a suicide cult -but not the CCP. The only way this would not be the case is the Chinese having a secret vaccine. 2 problems – Why did they not already deploy their secret vaccine? AND This family of viruses really does not do vaccines. If the Chinese really do have an effective coronavirus vaccine – we have far far more to worry about them and their biomedical progress.

2) This virus is not nearly lethal enough to be an effective bioweapon. You need something that will mow down a population like a machine gun. There are several that can do that – this is not one of them. The scaremongering from articles like this in New York Magazine is proving to be a far more effective weapon than the virus ever was.

3) The limited lethality this virus does have – is concentrated in the nursing home crowd. That may actually help an enemy in a time of war. You need something that is going to take out the young and middle-aged people.

As I stated above – coronaviruses are weird – and they can do weird things – it is very easy to jump to all kinds of conclusions. But that does not mean it was man made. If it was man-made, it is assuredly not a bioweapon – it was some kind of vaccine research that got out. And by the way – we do the same thing here – and there have been documented instances where OURS got out. We should not be passing judgment on the Chinese about this.

To be clear, I don’t believe that the Chinese released this thing as a bioweapon. I suspect — can’t prove it, but this is what I believe probably happened — that they were researching coronaviruses for bioweapon potential, and this one got out. I could be wrong.