Your hands can show if you have already had Covid - and beaten it.
Five tell-tale signs you've had the virus can appear on your nails, according to Birmingham Live.
Experts say the signs can be subtle and will not indicate how severe a bout of coronavirus has been.
For some patients who have had Covid, their fingernails appear discoloured or misshapen a number of weeks later – this phenomenon has been dubbed 'Covid nails', Devon Live reports.
The five possible signs can include:
- Horizontal lines: Known as 'Beau's lines', these tend to appear four weeks or more after infection. Beau’s lines occur when there is a temporary interruption in nail growth due to a physical stress on the body, such as an infection, malnutrition or side-effects of medications
A half-moon which is visibly red in colour. This seems to present earlier than other Cocid-related nail complaints, with patients noticing it less than two weeks after being diagnosed. A possible cause could be blood vessel damage associated with the virus itself
- Grooves across the fingernails, around five millimetres from the nail bed, are also a common indicator
- And so can orange nail tips, with discolouration presenting in patients on the continent
- The final sign is nail lifting, or onychomadesis, which is the loss of a nail from its root without any pain or swelling
According to an article on The Conversation, these marks don’t appear to be anything to worry about, as patients can be otherwise asymptomatic .
Although it is unclear how long they stay for, having lasted from between one week to over four weeks in the cases reported.
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