(Heidi Ledford/ Nature) — In the chaos of the first months of the coronavirus pandemic, oncologist and geneticist Ami Bhatt was intrigued by widespread reports of vomiting and diarrhoea in people infected with SARS-CoV-2.

“At that time, this was thought to be a respiratory virus,” she says. Bhatt and her colleagues, curious  …

(Sarah Hellewell/The Conversation) — Most of what we know about how COVID can affect the brain has come from studies of severe infection. In people with severe COVID, inflammatory cells from outside the brain can enter brain tissue and spread inflammation. There may be changes to blood vessels. Brain cells can even have  …

(Jesse Feith/ Montreal Gazette) — Last December, when Dr. Anne Bhéreur contracted COVID-19 in the palliative care unit where she works, she expected to recover and be back among her patients within 10 days.

Nearly a year later, however, this still hasn’t happened for the 45-year-old family doctor.

Short of breath and with  …

(Healthline) — COVID-19 can cause severe illness, sometimes leading to hospitalization and death. But even for people who had mild symptoms, some people have been left with long-term symptoms, now called long-haul COVID-19, or “long COVID.”

“Long COVID is the syndrome of persistent symptoms that develops after the   …

(Michael Marshall/ Nature) — When Claire Hastie fell ill in March of last year, she reacted the way she usually would to a minor ailment: she tried to ignore it. “It started off incredibly mild,” she says. “I would normally have paid no attention to it whatsoever.”

But within a week she was flattened. “I had just never felt ill  …

(Elizabeth Payne/ Healthing) — New UK research showing loss of grey matter in the brains of people who had COVID-19 is being called the most definitive evidence yet of the serious long-term impact of the virus on the brain.

Using brain scans done prior to the pandemic as part of a massive UK health imaging study, researchers  …