What Are COVID Toes?

Short answer is they aren't good!

If having COVID-19 isn't bad enough, we can now add a mysterious toe rash to the list of things that can happen if you test positive for the coronavirus. You have the symptoms we've been hearing about for a year now including, fever, chills, cough, loss of taste and smell and now according to News 10 an odd symptom some are experiencing is a toe rash.

According to Mayo Clinic dermatologist Dawn Davis, COVID toes looks just like a well-known rash called pernio, which shows up on skin as sores or bumps that appear after being exposed to cold. She said, "COVID toes is a pernio-like reaction that we think is due to inflammation or clotting in the superficial vessels of the feet, likely due to an inflammatory response affecting the blood vessel walls or blood cells, or a combination of both."

If COVID toes isn't weird enough, health experts are saying that COVID toes has been happening to people weeks after their initial COVID-19 exposure and it tends to affect people with lower body masses, as they have less supportive tissue between their toes. COVID toes symptoms include the area becoming itchy, with redness, and purple discoloration and in some cases the rash can burn as well.

Is COIVD toes a common thing? According to one expert Dr. Amy Paller, who's the chair of the Department of Dermatology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, "we are seeing COVID toes in unprecedented numbers during the COVID pandemic." As doctors and health experts try to figure out the rash, COVID toes is a helpful clue for doctors to identify an asymptomatic patient who might have the virus.