This explains a lot - blood clotting and happy hypoxia! [View all]

I love this article because it answers a few questions I've had for a while now.

A new study of Covid lungs looked at alveoli blood vessel destruction rather than fluid build-up (typical of pneumonia) as the cause of low oxygen in coronavirus patients. The article puts the study in context with the clotting phenomena and the odd presentation of patients who seem fine but are very low in blood oxygen (dubbed happy hypoxia).

The small study -- which compared the lungs of seven patients who died of the flu, the lungs of seven patients who died of COVID-19, and tissue from people who died with healthy lungs -- confirmed two things research previously hinted at. First, the spiky coronavirus that causes COVID-19 invades the lining of blood vessels, a tissue called the endothelium. Second, injury to the endothelium promotes blood clots and makes it so these vessels don’t work as well.