I just came across an interesting article in Salon this morning. It references a study published in the Lancet that seems to tie together a lot of the other effects of COVID-19 in some people, the blood clots that don’t seem to be helped by thinners, resulting organ damage, “Covid Toe”, pediatric multisystem inflammatory syndrome, etc. The researchers found that COVID-19 attaches to ACE2 receptors in endothelial cells — which form the barrier between blood vessels and organ tissues and control the transmission of fluids between them.
The researchers found that organ transplants from a COVID infected donor can also carry the virus to the person getting the donor transplant. The researchers discovered COVID “viral inclusion structures” in a transplanted kidney of a transplant patient that died of multisystem organ failure after the transplant.
The medical director of Brigham and Women’s Hospital Heart and Vascular Center, Mandeep Mehra opined:
If you start to put all of the data together that's emerging, it turns out that this virus is probably a vasculotropic virus, meaning that it affects the [blood vessels].
The endothelial cells in the lungs are just the primary opening attack points for a serious bout of COVID-19, since the main transmission vector is airborne spread (with a secondary of surface contact spread).