It’s been almost eight months since Chinese scientists identified the coronavirus and doctors are still discovering new symptoms that can ravage the body and leave lasting damage months after recovery.
While more than 813,000 people have died from the disease, most of the more than 23.6 million people with confirmed infections have recovered. But it hasn’t affected all of them the same. Once thought of as just a respiratory illness, COVID-19 is marked as much by the variety of potentially perilous ways it harms the body as it is for the signature pneumonia it often causes, alarming doctors and public health officials.
Because the coronavirus attacks a variety of cells in the body, there isn’t one thing that connects every symptom or one treatment that seems to help every case.