Rashes, swelling not allergy to virus, experts say

Woman’s Tiktok video viewed more than 4.4M times.

When Morgan Mcelroy suddenly stopped being able to smell and taste earlier this month, she wasn’t all that surprised. Her mother, whom she lives with in Dayton, Ohio, had recently started showing symptoms of COVID- 19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, and Mcelroy, 20, figured that she had also been infected.

What Mc Elroy didn’ t expect, though, was to find herself in the emergency room a day later— swollen and covered in a red, itchy, hive like rash that was spreading all over her body.

“I’m allergic to COVID,” Mcelroy said in a Tiktok video documenting her dramatic experience that has been viewed more than 4.4 million times.

But though her symptoms looked like an allergic reaction, experts say it is “highly unlikely” that Mcelroy developed an ac t ual allergy to the novel coronavirus.

“She’ s not allergic to COVID,” said Purvi Parikh, an allergist and immunologist with the Allergy and Asthma Network, who has seen several COVID-19 patients reporting similar reactions. Rashes are “frequently known consequences of viruses and usually benign ,” Parikh added .“Actual allergies can be life- threatening. ... It would be misleading to suggest you could be allergic to a virus.”

Instead, the symptoms Mcel roy developed are more likely a by product of her immune system fighting the coronavirus, said David Stukus, a member of the COVID- 19 response task force for the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology.

“We know t hat COVID really can be a systematic disease for a lot of people” he said .“When it comes to COVID- 19, anything and everything is in play.”

Viruses and other infections are common triggers for seemingly random episodes of hives and swelling, Stukus said, adding, “It can be very dramatic, especially when somebody’ s face swells; nobody wants to see that. It can be very debilitating because it can be severely itchy, but it’s very different than an allergic reaction and anaphylaxis.”

To call Mcelroy’s reaction an allergy oversimplifies the immune system’s complex responses, said Panagis Galiatsatos, an assistant professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins.

“It just means her immune system doesn’t like COVID, no different than every other human being’s immune system,” said Galiatsatos, a pulmonary and critical care doctor who works with COVID-19 patients.

Rashes and swelling triggered by infections are most commonly seen in young children, Parikh said, which may be why “it freaks adults out a little bit more” when it happens to them. Still, Parikh emphasized t hat there is usually no need to panic.

The allergy like symptoms are probably the result of a person’s immune system becoming “a little too overactive in its task to clear the infection,” she said.

This reaction, Parikh noted, is not believed to be connected to the other types of rashes caused by the corona virus, including the unusual frost bite-like patches that have been observed on people’s toes and sometimes fingers. But what Mcelroy described on Tiktok “is more similar to what we see with viruses in general,” Parikh said.