Medical staff at Mount Sinai Hospitals in the city have seen growing evidence that the Coronavirus causes blood clotting in unusual ways, resulting in an increase in strokes among patients who would not normally suffer from them, CNN reported.
“The virus seems to be causing increased clotting in the large arteries, leading to severe stroke,” neurosurgeon Dr Thomas Oxley explained. “Our report shows a seven-fold increase in incidence of sudden stroke in young patients during the past two weeks. Most of these patients have no past medical history and were at home with either mild symptoms (or in two cases, no symptoms) of Covid. All tested positive. Two of them delayed calling an ambulance,” he added.
While Oxley’s team typically register fewer than two strokes per month from people under the age of 50, they have now seen at least five over the two-week period. Their findings will soon be published in a letter in the New England Journal of Medicine.
This is bad news for New York, where officials have advised inhabitants against calling 911 unless they experience severe symptoms, in order to not further strain the city’s struggling emergency services.
Oxley urged New Yorkers to remember warning signs for strokes by remembering “FAST”: F for face drooping; A for arm weakness; S for speech difficulty and T for time to call 911.
Body bags accompany ‘medically stable’ patients
Within days, after New York Governor Andrew Cuomo decreed – on March 25 – that nursing homes could not refuse to admit “medically stable” Coronavirus patients, three of the 30 healthy residents in a nursing home died.
Moreover, Coronavirus patients admitted to a Queens nursing home under this controversial state mandate arrived a supply of body bags, The New York Post reported.
The nursing home — which was previously free of the deadly disease — said the bags were received on the same day the facility was forced to begin treating two people discharged from hospitals with Covid-19.
“My colleague noticed that one of the boxes was extremely heavy. Curious as to what could possibly be making that particular box so much heavier than the rest, he opened it,” a staff member told daily. “The first two Coronavirus patients were accompanied by five body bags.”
The staff member added: “Cuomo has blood on his hands. He really does. There’s no way to sugarcoat this.”
