Plasma viscosity in COVID-19 disease: a vital monitoring role.

The coronavirus SARS-COV-2, which emerged in late 2019, continues to spread around the world, having infected more than 4.5 million people at time of writing, and leading to more than 300,000 deaths. The COVID-19 disease presents a rapid learning challenge for everyone involved in battling with the condition. While widely regarded as primarily a respiratory disease, it is increasingly being recognised by doctors and scientists as a systemic infection, which affects not only the respiratory tract, but also the central nervous system, musculoskeletal, renal, haematological and hepatic systems.

The haematological clinical manifestations of COVID-19 are receiving increasing attention, as the scientific and medical community work hard at trying to solve some of the many questions posed. For example, why is it that some patients have severe symptoms while others have relatively mild symptoms? What is the pathology of the emerging phenomenon of the Kawasaki-like illness linked to COVID-19, which has coronary artery aneurysms as its main complication?¹ Why do a substantial proportion of severe COVID-19 patients develop venous and arterial thromboembolic conditions, and what can we do to improve early recognition of these?² Haematological investigations are going to be critical to solving these and other emerging questions. Many of the supporting answers could lie in plasma viscosity.

Plasma viscosity testing