Covid: the young danger

The old, the diabetic, the obese. These are the victims of the critical forms of Covid-19. That’s what everyone thinks last March. White coats, media, public. Young people are possible vectors, but they are immune. When Elia Fontaine, an 18-year-old Belgian high school student and talented basketball player, in full health, begins to fail on March 18, the first day of imprisonment through Quiévrain, neither she nor her parents are thinking about the coronavirus. Blue eyes, long golden hair, Vanessa Paradis air of the era of “Joe the Taxi”, Elia is young, athletic, slim, has no comorbidities. Besides, his symptoms don’t match those of the first patients in Wuhan. He has no fever; on the contrary, she is cold, she is frozen, her hands and feet are turning purple. Its temperature is only 32.4 degrees. Emergencies. Nausea. He retched. Doctors suspect a bout of appendicitis. To rule out Covid, he still passes a PCR test. Positive.

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In Elijah, Sars-CoV-2 does not attack the lungs. It gnaws at the heart. Literally. And no doctor even today can explain why. She fell into an artificial coma: “When I lost consciousness, there were four deaths in Belgium due to Covid. When I woke up, there were 4,000, ”she says in the corridors of the Citadel hospital in Liege, where she was treated for many months. And that’s close to saturation again today in the face of the second wave. First three weeks of coma, during which his vital prognosis is committed at all times. Heavy equipment circulates his blood and regenerates it outside his body. “None of my organs worked except the kidneys. Hell and helplessness for his parents and two brothers. In full confinement, despite visiting bans, her mother was granted the right to see her for fifteen minutes every day. Elijah’s life hangs by a thread. But all the staff are fighting the virus. Comes out of coma on April 15th. The young patient, who continues to smile as she tells her story, receives a nickname in the hospital: “the little miracle”.

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When she opens her eyes, nurses in cosmonaut robes surround her. I understand nothing. He does not know that the world is upside down. She doesn’t know the doctors had to amputate her toes. He doesn’t know that his life has changed forever. When they later tell her that her foot is dead and needs to be amputated below the knee, she cries, thinks about the lost basketball, but her father finds the words. We don’t get mad at fountains. Elijah looks up. You have to feel the magnetic power of this sweet girl who struggles to stay serious during the photo shoot. Unbreakable. Today, after months of rehabilitation, he returns to playing basketball with a special prosthesis. When he left the hospital, orderlies, nurses and doctors gave him an honor guard. They have lost hundreds of patients. Not her. With her cardiologist, Sabrina Joachim, she met the king of the Belgians at the royal palace. She became an ambassador for wearing a mask in Belgium: “They are living proof that you have to protect yourself. It can happen to anyone! “

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This can happen to those who believed themselves stronger than this “little virus”, like Isabelle Fabre, a 33-year-old athletic engineer who turned into an extreme videographer and who posts her kitesurfing exploits on Instagram. His abdominal pads have loosened, he has been suffering from Covid symptoms for five months. She became asthmatic and believed for a long time that she had lost her cognitive abilities forever: “I became stupid, I had blackouts, I made spelling mistakes, I thought very slowly. It was an antidepressant treatment that got me back on my feet when I wasn’t depressed. This can happen to a 19-year-old young man like Augustin Azuar, a digital communication and design student, who also felt invulnerable. In the family home, in Bourges, he remembers that strange angina that compressed his chest and that he resisted all treatments, he remembers that moment in the hospital where the cars around his bed started to stop. beeps, of the four nurses who ran around him: “It was like in a movie, I was there and in the wrong place. Jacqueline, his mother, recounts the anguish, the last discussion before admission: “I told him that I loved him, that I was happy to have a son like him, that he had a good life. . “

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I had a very severe bilateral pulmonary embolism, any movement could move the clot and kill me, I was afraid of my life. Antoine

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It can also happen to Antoine, a 34-year-old company manager, three sports sessions a week, who prefers to keep his surname silent so as not to worry his customers. Antoine defines himself as a maniac, he loves order, organization, parallel things, a man who controls everything, an engineer of existence who, for his part, has taken the virus very seriously from the beginning. Her father, who is diabetic, has high blood pressure. It is sensitized. For many months, he meticulously washed fruits and vegetables with wipes, wore the mask, respected the barrier gestures. He only let his guard down one evening, last September 18 in Paris. It was hot that day, the windows of the apartment were open. Ten guests, including one positive person who doesn’t know. We are rebuilding the world with a full throat. The virus is happy about it. The other nine hosts are infected. Light forms, except Antoine who “wins the jackpot”. Fever, difficulty in breathing. Antoine stoically resists but, on the ninth day, his situation worsens. Staggers to the hospital. There he waits five hours for a scanner that doesn’t arrive. Emergencies are saturated. He flees, signs a waiver of responsibility and the next day makes an appointment with the famous radiologist Rodolphe Gombergh, known for his 3D animated images inside the human body. “After the scan, he told me not to move, I had a very severe bilateral pulmonary embolism, any movement could move the clot and kill me, I was afraid of my life. »Doctor Gombergh sends Antoine back to hospital in an ambulance with the scanner under his arm, he immediately takes an anticoagulant treatment which helps him. As soon as.

Kyris Eracleous went through the same incident. High-fashion hairdresser, this 35-year-old Cretan slipped through the shirts during the first wave, before being carried away by the second. He too owes his survival to Rodolphe Gombergh: “Without him I was dead. You have to tell people that these imaging techniques, which I didn’t know existed, save lives. “This pulmonary embolism is the real killer, it can affect young and old and causes great dangers if it is not detected and treated quickly”, explains Rodolphe Gombergh. There are two techniques for this: biology (with D-dimers) and low dose scanner with injection. This process, dear to the radiologist, already made it possible to travel inside the coronary arteries or the aorta. Now he can explore the pulmonary arteries and experience early embolism. A world first.

Young people between the ages of 15 and 44 represent only 5% of hospitalized or ICU patients, but with an out-of-control epidemic affecting between 50,000 and 100,000 people every day, often a crowd of patients. broke in full unconsciousness. Why do some of them, like Elia, Antoine or Augustin, develop serious forms?

In 10% of severe cases, the body would also attack its own defenses

“There are hypotheses, not absolute proofs”, replies Lisa Chakrabarti, director of research at the virus and immunity laboratory of the Institut Pasteur. Immunological mechanisms are complex, but recent findings provide a fairly serious advantage, at least for some of the patients, says the researcher: “Resistance to the virus would depend on innate immunity, an ultra-rapid defense put in place by the body against viruses before the production of antibodies. It is a response that occurs in all cells, not just specialized ones. The entry points for the virus are the nose and the mucous membranes of the throat. Thanks to proteins called interferons, the cells in these doors can detect the intruder and sound the alarm throughout the body. Interferons slow the multiplication of the virus. However, two articles published in late September highlighted more frequent defects of this system in severe cases of Covid, in young people such as in the elderly, with mutations in the genes involved in the activation of these proteins. In 10% of severe cases, the body would also attack its own defenses, reducing the ability of interferons to act. The speed of reaction to this very special virus is essential: “On tissue models, we have been able to show that Covid-19 slows down the production of interferons, unlike other viruses. Thus giving it a head start on the immune system. “

This strange virus, this “little flu”, is just beginning to reveal the extent of the damage it can cause, sometimes with mysterious and happy consequences, probably unrelated to its action but affecting the mind. During her three weeks in a coma, the young Belgian Elia has grown by… 6 centimeters. Without trying to understand the reasons for this sudden and late increase in size, the basketball player chose to rejoice and bring the Covid-19 on the rebound: “Now I’m much better against the basket. “no

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