What Doctors Are Learning From Autopsy Findings of Coronavirus (COVID-19) Patients Once the SARS-CoV-2 virus is deeply embedded in the body, it begins to cause more severe disease. This is where direct attack on other organs that have ACE2 receptors can occur, including heart muscle, kidneys, blood vessels, liver, and the brain. Early findings, including those from multiple autopsy and biopsy reports, show that viral particles can be found not only in the nasal passages and throat, but also in tears, stool, kidneys, liver, pancreas, and heart. One case report found evidence of viral particles in the CSF, meaning the fluid around the brain. That patient had meningitis. So the virus is sometimes going to all these different organs by means of attaching to the ACE2 receptors that are there, but that’s not even the whole story. Because in some cases, by the time the body’s immune system figures out the body is being invaded, its like unleashing the military to stomp out the virus, and in that process, there’s a ton of collateral damage. This, is what we refer to as the cytokine storm. When the virus gets into the alveolar cells, meaning the tiny little air sacs within the lungs, it makes a ton of copies of itself, and goes onto invade more cells. The alveoli’s next door neighbor is guess who, yeah, the tiniest blood vessels in our body, capillaries. And the lining of those capillaries is called endothelium, which also have ACE2 receptors. And once the
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