Intestine, kidney among several organs that can get infected by COVID-19: Study

COVID-19 can infect intestines, kidneys and several other organs of the the body according to a recent study.

The findings might help explain some of the puzzling symptoms seen in coronavirus patients including blood clots that cause strokes in younger people and that clog dialysis machines, headaches and kidney failure.

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As cases of coronavirus infection proliferate around the world and governments take extraordinary measures to limit the spread, there is still a lot of confusion about what exactly the virus does to people’s bodies.

According to a study published in Nature Medicine, Jie Zhou and colleagues at the University of Hong Kong grew intestinal organoids, lab dish versions of the organs, from both bats and people. They found the virus not only lived in these organoids, but replicated.

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Separately, a team at University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf in Germany performed autopsies on 27 patients who died from Covid-19. 

"SARS-CoV-2 was detected in the kidneys of the patients which explains the high rate of injury in the specific organ of the coronavirus patients,'' they wrote in a letter published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Previous reports have suggested that the fatal coronavirus has an adverse impact on the lungs, throat, heart, liver and brain of those who get infected by it.