The latest unexpected side effect happened to an 86-year-old woman in Italy, whose fingers turned black with gangrene as COVID-19 caused severe clotting, cutting off the blood supply to her extremities.
Doctors were forced to amputate three of her digits after diagnosing the woman in April 2020, calling the case study a “severe manifestation” of the disease in a new report published in the European Journal of Vascular & Endovascular Surgery.
Physicians were already aware that the coronavirus may wreak havoc on the vascular system, though they aren’t yet sure why.
Currently, many in the medical community believe that the side effect may be related to an increasingly common immune overreaction to COVID-19, called a “cytokine storm,” which prompts the body to attack both sickened cells and healthy tissues.
The medical community continues to discover new, unexpected conditions of the disease — as the US approaches 27 million cases this week since the March 2020 outbreak, per…