ABOVE: Slice of a deceased COVID-19 patient’s olfactory bulb, illustrating an area (left) with significant leakage of fibrinogen (fluorescent green) into the tissue, likely the result of damage to small blood vessels.
DRAGAN MERIC
When epidemics and pandemics washed over humanity through the ages, watchful doctors noticed that in addition to the usual, mostly respiratory ailments, the illnesses also seemed to trigger neurological symptoms. One British throat specialist observed in the late 1800s that influenza appeared to “run up and down the nervous keyboard stirring up disorder and pain in different parts of the body with what almost seems malicious caprice.” Indeed, some patients during the 1889–92 influenza pandemic reportedly became afflicted with psychoses, paranoia, stabbing pains, and nerve damage. Similarly, scholars have linked the 1918 flu pandemic to parkinsonism, neuropsychiatric disorders, and a broadly coinciding outbreak of the “sleeping sickness” encephalitis lethargica, which would often arrest patients in a coma-like ...
