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When the first wave of the pandemic hit the US East Coast last spring, clinicians expected to see patients suffering primarily from a respiratory ailment that, in severe cases, left people needing mechanical ventilators to breathe. But Harvard Medical School’s Haytham Kaafarani, a trauma surgeon and critical-care physician at Massachusetts General Hospital, and his colleagues noticed an unexpected surge in patients with complications in another part of the body—the gut—ranging from nausea and a loss of appetite to severe intestinal obstruction. According to Kaafarani, gastrointestinal surgeons were consulted frequently for “many, many symptoms that showed up.”
Now, with SARS-CoV-2 having infected more than 100 million people and counting, it’s clear that the virus can indeed lead to extensive damage outside of the lungs—damage that has contributed to a total of more than 3 million deaths to date. Over the past year and a half, ...
