A new study says most of the internal wreckage for the most severe cases of COVID-19 wasn't being directly inflicted by the virus itself but by a blizzard of immune reactions triggered by the body to fight the infection.
From the early days of the pandemic, doctors noticed that in severe cases of COVID-19 -- the ones that landed people in the hospital on ventilators with shredded lungs -- most of the internal wreckage wasn't being directly inflicted by the virus itself but by a blizzard of immune reactions triggered by the body to fight the infection.
In the case of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, however, that doesn't happen. The virus gets out of the endosome and escapes into the body of the cell, where it starts making copies of itself. "I think it's really elegant," said Donna Farber, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Columbia University, describing the study. "They actually put some pieces together that hadn't been put together before." She was not involved in the research.
"They're much, much more likely to start these inflammatory fires," she said. "They have sort of a low slow burn going on anyway. And once it gets started it's really hard to put out the fire."There's another piece of the process, though, that suggests a way it might be stopped, and that's how the virus gets into these white blood cells.
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