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In early March, in a conference call with researchers in China, hematologist Alfred Lee, George Goshua, and others at the Yale School of Medicine were forewarned about an unusual finding in COVID-19 patients in advanced stages of the disease. Doctors were observing ischemic digits, or black fingers and toes. To Lee and Goshua, this sounded like a microvascular thrombosis, minute blood clots in small blood vessels. A few weeks later, the Yale physicians were confronted with their first COVID-19 death, ostensibly due to a major blood clot in the patient’s lung, which prompted them to set up a panel of clotting tests for COVID-19 patients.
What came back was something Lee had never seen before: levels of the von Willebrand factor (VWF), a protein involved in blood clotting, were through the roof; they had surpassed the upper limit of detection of the laboratory assay the ...
