August 11, 2020: A large number of others who contract COVID-19 (up to 40%, by some estimates) never expand visual symptoms.
They don’t have a fever. Do not cough or feel shortness of breath, and do not revel in the variety of other symptoms that would possibly involve COVID-19 infection, such as freezing-like skin bumps, diarrhea, or loss of smell or taste.
“It’s a very giant component of people, and they’re silently symptomless, internally taking internal blows to their bodies, so they don’t even know it,” says Eric Topol, MD, founder and director of the Scripps Translational Research Institute in Los Angeles. Jolla, California. Topol and his co-author Daniel Oran recently tested medical evidence of asymptomatic infections.
Researchers who scanned the center and lungs of others who tested positive for COVID-19 but never felt sick, saw revealing symptoms of distress.
In the lungs, scientists reported cloudy white spaces called “frosted glass opacity” in asymptomatic patients. Frosted glass opacity is also observed in patients with more severe COVID-19.
In 4 other studies of others with asymptomatic infections, about part of them had frosted glass opacity on CT scans.
One was an examination of the passengers of the Diamond Princess cruiser, which was quarantined for 2 weeks off the coast of Japan. In the end, 712 passengers, out of the 3,700 on board, tested positive. Almost part of them, 331, had no symptoms. Of these, 76 were tested for lung by a CT scan for a CT scan. More than one part of them had frosted glass opacity, they didn’t have as much pain as other people with symptoms.
Aileen Marty, MD, a professor of infectious diseases at Florida International University, says fog spaces are spaces of inflammation. It’s a sign that the lung is in poor health. She saw it for herself. In their hospitals, 67% of others who are not yet in poor health and who test positive for COVID-19 have visual lung adjustments on CT scans.
No one yet knows precisely what those adjustments mean, or they will persist and shape scar tissue or simply heal and disappear after the infection is gone.
“I think if you’re young and have enough lung reserve, you won’t miss it because you can serve perfectly,” Marty says. “It’s kind of like, you know, they say you have long hair and you cut yourself 5 cm. Most people may not even realize you’re cutting your hair because you have a lot of hair.
They’re adults only. Two studies reported the same trend in young people with asymptomatic infections at COVID-19 in Wuhan, China.
That’s one of the reasons Palm Beach County Health Department Director Alina Alonso, MD, warned the county to be careful when reopening schools.
“They see that there is lung damage in these asymptomatic children. Array… We don’t know how that is going to manifest itself in a year or two,” Alonso told Palm Beach County commissioners at an assembly in July. “Will this child have chronic lung disorders or not?”
Valentina Puntmann, MD, questioned the long-term effect of COVID-19 at the center. Puntmann is an expert in cardiac imaging at the University Hospital Frankfurt in Germany. She and a team of researchers recently scanned the centers of a hundred patients who had recently recovered from COVID-19, 18 of whom were asymptomatic. They found that 78 showed symptoms of central damage, adding the upper grades of troponin, proteins released through the central muscle when damaged. Not all asymptomatic patients had markers of heart lesions, but some of them had some of the highest grades measured in the study.
“We discovered an organization of asymptomatic patients suffering from inflammation,” Puntmann said in an email to WebMD.
Puntmann says many of his recovered COVID-19 patients get tired without problems and can’t train as hard as they’d like. “We see that often,” she says.
Topol warns that the test is small and that the effects for asymptomatic patients were not detailed separately. He says it’s difficult to draw conclusions about the upper grades of troponin because hearts in general can also have the upper troponin grades.
Certainly, he says, asymptomatic infections are ready for research.
“Who knows what other organs are affected? We don’t know,” he says, “no one has ever looked.”
Anthony Fauci, MD, Director, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Bethesda, MD.
Donna Farber, PhD, Professor of Microbiology and Immunology; Principal Investigator, Columbia Center for Translational Immunology, Columbia University, New York.
Aileen Marty, MD, Professor of Infectious Diseases and Travel Medicine, Herbert Wertheim School of Medicine, Florida International University, Miami.
Eric Topol, MD, founder and director, Scripps Translational Research Institute, La Jolla, California; Editor-in-chief, Medscape.
Valentina Puntmann, MD, PhD, Assistant Director, Senior Clinical Research Officer, Institute of Experimental and Translational Cardiovascular Imaging, DZHK Cardiovascular Imaging Center, University of Frankfurt, Germany.
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