Disseminated Intravascular Coagulation (DIC) is a serious condition where your body forms so many clots that you consume all your clotting factors and ironically start to easily bleed as well. DIC can occur in any critical illness or infection and is not specific to COVID-19.

Normally, your body is in a fine tuned balance or homeostasis between clot forming and clot busting. But when you are seriously ill like with a massive infection from the coronavirus, your body releases cytokines like interleukin-1 which fights infection but promotes clotting.

Interleukin-1 activates a protein called Tissue Factor, which starts an avalanche of reactions in the coagulation pathway leading to massive clotting in small vessels everywhere in the body in DIC. This is a problem in sepsis and many types of critical illnesss not just COVID-19.

So while it may be tempting for reporters and medical journals to make it seem like patients with the coronavirus are mysteriously forming so many clots or getting deadly pulmonary embolisms or even have internal bleeding, just know that this is not a new phenomenon at all.