By now we know that a COVID-19 infection can affect you in some unexpected ways. In addition to a fever or cough, some people might develop “COVID nails,” which can appear as deep lines on your fingernails. But those signs aren’t always related to COVID-19—and not everyone who has the infection will develop them.
“Do your nails look odd? COVID nails are increasingly being recognized as the nails recover after infection and the growth recovers leaving a clear line. Can occur without skin rashes and appears harmless,” Tim Spector, professor of genetic epidemiology at King’s College London, wrote on Twitter earlier this month. The tweet drew a lot of new attention to COVID nails, but simply having what looks like COVID nails isn’t necessarily a cause for concern.
COVID nails appear to actually be a manifestation of a condition called Beau’s lines, which can appear after illnesses that cause fever. There have been a few case studies highlighting Beau’s lines after COVID-19 infections, including this study involving a 45-year-old man in the Canadian Medical Association Journal. Other case studies, such as this one about a 60-year-old woman published in the Journal of the European Academy of Dermatology and Venereology, have also found people who developed red half-moons in their nails alongside COVID-19 infections.
In all these cases, it’s not clear whether COVID-19 specifically caused the nail issues, and experts are still trying to understand how common they are. For one review study, the authors identified six case studies looking at nail changes in people who’d had COVID-19. Of those people, two presented with Beau’s lines, two had red half-moons, and two had other issues.
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The truth is that a lot of health issues—big and small—can affect your nails. For instance, if you see lines that run vertically on the nail, those are common and generally harmless, the American Academy of Dermatology (AAD) explains. But Beau’s lines, which appear as deep lines or grooves that run across the width of your nails, can occur when your nails suddenly stop growing or grow more slowly than usual.