Pink Eye a Symptom of COVID-19

If you watched last night's debate with Vice President Pence and VP candidate Harris, you may have noticed that VP Pence had some issue with his eye...as well as that fly that everyone seems to be talking about today.  But since President Trump's positive COVID test, people have been watching everyone associated with the president to see if any virus symptoms are evident.

The "pink eye" that VP Pence had last night looked more like broken blood vessel than pink eye, but it still brought up the question- is pink eye a symptom of the virus?

A quick check of WebMD shows that yes, apparently it IS!  Color me astounded.  I mean, I always have thought that someone contracts pink eye from poop... as in not washing hands well enough and touching a surface that may or may not have feces on it in some shape or form.  Gross, right?  But according to WebMD, pink eye can be a symptom in people who have very severe coronavirus symptoms.

The more severe a patient's COVID-19 is, the more likely it is that he or she will also have pink eye, according to the report published online March 31 in JAMA Ophthalmology.

And there's more!  And how did we not really hear much, or anything about this when this study was done early this past Spring?

Of 38 patients with COVID-19, a dozen also had pink eye (conjunctivitis), a new study found. In two patients, the coronavirus was present in both nasal and eye fluids.

"Some COVID-19 patients have ocular symptoms, and maybe novel coronaviruses are present in the conjunctival secretions of patients with COVID-19," said researcher Dr. Liang Liang of the ophthalmology department at China Three Gorges University in Yichang.

Well, this is just gross.  Like anyone wants to deal with pink eye along with everything else you apparently deal with when you actually have COVID.  Great.  Now, it's another thing.