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Among the many strange and unexpected symptoms of COVID-19, the UK lead professor recently highlighted another lesser-known symptom of the infection that affects a person’s mouth: the ‘COVID tongue’.
Professor Tim Spector, a genetic epidemiologist from King’s College London, tweeted a photo of an anonymous person’s tongue covered in unusual white spots, which he calls “COVID tongue.”
As Spector notes, the “COVID language” is not on any of Public Health England’s official COVID-19 symptom lists. There is also no mention of oral symptoms on the main symptoms listed by the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or the World Health Organization. Nonetheless, he argues that it could potentially be a key sign that you have the infection and that you need to stay home to self-isolate.
“One in five people with Covid still have less common symptoms that are not listed on the official PHE [Public Health England] list – like rashes, ”Professor Spector tweeted Wednesday. “Seeing an increasing number of Covid tongues and strange mouth ulcers. If you have a weird symptom or even just a headache and fatigue, stay home! “
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Professor Spector runs the ZOE COVID Symptom Study app, which allows people to enroll and self-report any of their COVID-19 symptoms when infected. With more than 4.5 million people providing data globally, the app is part of one of the world’s largest ongoing studies on COVID-19 and hopes to provide new scientific understanding of the various symptoms that the virus causes in different people.
This is not the first time that COVID-19 has been associated with symptoms of the tongue and mouth. Research published in the journal Nature Evidence-based dentistry in June 2020, he detailed three patients with COVID-19 who were suffering from mouth ulcers or blisters in the mouth, possibly due to their infection. Another study, published in JAMA Dermatology examined 21 patients with COVID-19 in Spain who had rashes and found six people (29 percent) also with a mouth rash, looking like small red spots inside the mouth. In most of the cases studied, the oral symptoms did not appear to be related to any medications the patients were taking, leading the researchers to conclude that it was a symptom of their COVID-19 infection.
Other studies have also shown that the virus responsible for COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2, is able to directly infect the mouth. Pre-printing paper, which has yet to be peer reviewed, says researchers have detected SARS-CoV-2 in the salivary glands and lining of people with COVID-19.
There have even been unconfirmed reports of people with COVID-19 losing their teeth, although IFLScience spoke to a dentist who was skeptical that the infection was mainly responsible for tooth loss.
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