Pathophysiology of COVID-19

ABSTRACT

Coronavirus disease is a respiratory infection caused by SARS-CoV-2 virus, which generates a cascade of systemic events, affecting different organs and tissues. Understanding the pathophysiology of COVID-19 is essential not only when treating patients, but also to understand the causes of complications that a significant number of recovered patients suffer from. The objective of this article is to present an updated review of the effects of infection in different organs and systems that will be useful as reference material for healthcare professionals and medical students. To accomplish this task, a bibliographic search was carried out in PubMED, Scielo, Google Scholar, Cochrane and Springer Link portals, as well as in the pre-publication scientific repositories bioRxiv ("bioarchives") and medRxiv ("med-archives") databases. From a total of about 200 thousand articles, 100 articles were selected for this review based on their relevance or suggestions from experts involved in the field.