How the coronavirus almost kills a "healthy" woman and "without the usual symptoms"

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Rebecca Wrixon was aware that working as a babysitter for a British medical couple in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic was a risk. However, her good health and age, 44 years, made it not a problem. He wasn't much concerned about contracting the Covid-19 . At the beginning of April, all the data indicated that the disease hit the elderly and people with previous pathologies. Rebecca never thought she would be on the verge of death from the coronavirus .

According to CBS News, one morning, just after Easter Day, he woke up with a numb arm. He had no cough, no fever, had not lost his sense of smell or taste, only his arms stopped responding. With none of the symptoms of Covid-19 , it took days for doctors to diagnose the disease and much longer to figure out how they could stop your body's reaction to the virus.

The disease silently caused her body to attack itself , inflaming her brain, paralyzing half of her body, rendering her unable to see or speak, and nearly killing her in the process. Researchers in the UK now believe that Covid-19 can affect many more people with similar neurological symptoms than is commonly thought, including younger patients and those who, like Wrixon , never experienced the most well-known symptoms of the disease.

Wrixon's 11-year-old daughter was in bed with a fever for about a day in early April, after Wrixon experienced some chest pain and a mild rash, but never suspected it was the coronavirus . "I had no normal symptoms like the ones telling you to be careful. I just didn't feel well, I just had an itchy throat and a pain in my chest, but I didn't cough. I had no trouble breathing or anything like that, " he explains to CBS News from his home on the south coast of England.

"It wasn't until Tuesday of Easter break that I woke up and my arm was numb," he says. When her husband came down the stairs and found her struggling to grab the remote for the television and she said she couldn't feel either her arm or foot, the two of them immediately thought of the same thing, a stroke. Her husband started asking her about her daughter's birthday and other information, but she was unable to respond. "I couldn't answer. I had no idea," recalls Wrixon . "That's when we thought, 'I'm having a stroke.'" They called an ambulance and she was rushed to a hospital.

"It looked like he had a stroke," said Dr. Ashwin Pinto, the neurologist who handled the Wrixon case for nearly three weeks. The coronavirus , he said, was not among our possibilities. "

However tests quickly confirmed that there was never a stroke. In the following days, as Wrixon's state rapidly deteriorated and the magnitude of the pandemic began to accelerate across Europe, he was tested for Covid-19 to rule out. "I never thought it was going to be positive," says Dr. Pinto.

The result surprised him. However, despite the positive swab test, there was nothing in Wrixon's blood or cerebrospinal fluid to suggest that the virus was directly attacking his central nervous system. But it was a test that uncovered what was happening in his brain. MRI images showed that more than half of his brain was severely inflamed. At that time, Wrixon was unable to move half of his body at all. She could not see clearly and could not communicate with her doctors or her husband.

When the neurologists realized how bad it was, Wrixon's husband was told of what little chance he had. His daughter asked him to promise him that Mom would come home. He told her that the doctors were doing the best they could, but that he couldn't promise anything. "I thought I was going to die. I literally thought, 'No, you are not going out,'" Wrixon tells CBS News.

Dr Pinto was aware of one or two cases outside the UK that seemed similar. He had read a study of a patient in Detroit whose autoimmune response to a Covid-19 infection had caused similar severe brain inflammation, so he decided to take a risk and treat Wrixon not for a viral infection, but for a failure of the immune system. .

Once the Covid-19 infection had passed and she had tested negative for the virus, Pinto began giving Wrixon high doses of steroids and an exchange of blood plasma. The exchange is intended to remove enough plasma from a patient, the part of the blood that carries antibodies responsible for fighting an infection, and replace it with a protein from donors whose immune system does not overreact to anything, to stop the body's response and relieve inflammation. The treatment worked.

"As soon as the plasma exchange started, the next day I woke up and moved my first finger," says Wrixon . After five days of treatment, she stood up again. "I was moving. Literally, that plasma exchange was a miracle."

After two terrible weeks in the hospital, he went home and has since fully recovered. Three months later, Wrixon still feels pain and numbness in his hand, and he sometimes has trouble pronouncing words .

The duration of these effects, together with the general prevalence of neurological symptoms in patients with Covid-19 , continues to worry Dr. Pinto, co-author of a study on the case of Wrixon in the journal Neurology: Neuroinmunology & Neuroinflammation , and it is not the only one . A study published July 8 in the journal Neurology Brain found that of 43 patients with confirmed or suspected Covid-19 infections , 12 suffered from inflammation of the central nervous system, including the brain. Of those 12, one made a full recovery, 10 made partial recoveries, and one died.

Coronavirus infection "is associated with a broad spectrum of neurological syndromes," the study authors concluded. In particular, the "high incidence of acute disseminated encephalomyelitis" (ADEM is generalized inflammation in the brain and spinal cord) in patients. The study conducted at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery at University College London also noted that, as Wrixon discovered, severe inflammation "was not related to the severity of Covid-19 respiratory disease ."

According to University College London, the neurologists behind the research said they would normally treat one adult patient per month with ADEM, "but that increased to at least one per week during the study period - which coincided with the peak of the coronavirus in London. - which according to the researchers is a worrying increase ".

A larger study published in The Lancet , which includes data from UCL research, further analyzed the prevalence of neurological symptoms in patients with Covid-19 . "He identified a large proportion of cases of acute alteration in mental status, including neurological syndromic diagnoses such as encephalopathy and encephalitis, and primary psychiatric syndromic diagnoses, such as psychosis."

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

• UK
• Coronavirus
• Covid 19
• Science and health

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