COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, has produced morbidity and death in staggering numbers. At the time of this writing, COVID-19 is responsible for more than 210,000 deaths worldwide, including more than 56,000 deaths in the United States alone. By the time you read this, these numbers will have risen significantly.
The primary manifestation of COVID-19 is pulmonary in nature: fever with cough, dyspnea, and pneumonia. Now, anecdotal reports are suggesting that the virus also attacks the heart.
COVID-19: Is It Just the Lungs?
We've known that COVID-19 has profound pulmonary manifestations and can produce respiratory failure and acute respiratory distress syndrome. In recent months, however, we started hearing anecdotal reports from physicians in China and Italy about many of their patients who were not dying from pulmonary problems or hypoxemia. In fact, some would begin to show improvement from a pulmonary standpoint, but then, at around day 7 to 10 of symptoms, their condition would rapidly deteriorate because of deteriorating cardiac function.
We also heard reports that many of the critically ill patients never demonstrated radiographic signs of pneumonia, or that the radiographic findings did not correlate with the severity of the illness. Ruan and colleagues
