4 ms·

I think the current understanding is that the primary way that it kills is through circulatory system effects, blood clots that cause difficulty getting oxygen

I think the current understanding is that the primary way that it kills is through circulatory system effects, blood clots that cause difficulty getting oxygen from the lungs, as well as strokes and heart attacks and other organ failures.

wahern 7y ago
That's not an understanding, it's an observation and a very preliminary hypothesis for one of the major immediate causes of death. Huge difference. Because of all the additional attention, it would be unsurprising for doctors to seemingly discover all kinds of previously unexamined phenomenon which have always been present, or to confuse increases in certain phenomenon as peculiar rather than simply reflecting the fact that you have a ton of patients with the same type of illness. For example, in one of the articles about blood clots a doctor is quoted as saying something to the effect of, "we're used to seeing these types of blood clots in the ICU, but only in 1 or 2 patients at a time, never in this number". For the sake of argument, maybe that's just because they've never had an entire ICU full of patients in viral-induced acute respiratory distress, that such blood clots happen to be more prevalent in such cases, and if you examined all such ICU patients over time (COVID, flu, w'ever), you'd see a similar pattern. (Because it's usually the elderly who die from respiratory infections, not alot of attention is paid to mechanisms of death. "Pneumonia" is something of a catch-all term, especially with an older cohort.) Maybe it's typical of anything that can incite such immune reactions--the article hinted that the mechanism may be related to how Ebola works, except with opposite outcomes (clots instead of bleeding out), which suggests the mechanism might be more a reflection of the severity of the distress than anything peculiar to the infectious agent, per se. Maybe younger cohorts are more likely to clot, but before COVID-19 they rarely died or had such severe symptoms, so nobody quantified prevalence. And if so, treating the clots might not significantly reduce fatality rates; or maybe it would, not just for COVID-19 but any similar viral ailment.

wahern 7y ago

That's not an understanding, it's an observation and a very preliminary hypothesis for one of the major immediate causes of death. Huge difference. Because of all the additional attention, it would be unsurprising for doctors to seemingly discover all kinds of previously unexamined phenomenon which have always been present, or to confuse increases in certain phenomenon as peculiar rather than simply reflecting the fact that you have a ton of patients with the same type of illness. For example, in one of the articles about blood clots a doctor is quoted as saying something to the effect of, "we're used to seeing these types of blood clots in the ICU, but only in 1 or 2 patients at a time, never in this number". For the sake of argument, maybe that's just because they've never had an entire ICU full of patients in viral-induced acute respiratory distress, that such blood clots happen to be more prevalent in such cases, and if you examined all such ICU patients over time (COVID, flu, w'ever), you'd see a similar pattern. (Because it's usually the elderly who die from respiratory infections, not alot of attention is paid to mechanisms of death. "Pneumonia" is something of a catch-all term, especially with an older cohort.) Maybe it's typical of anything that can incite such immune reactions--the article hinted that the mechanism may be related to how Ebola works, except with opposite outcomes (clots instead of bleeding out), which suggests the mechanism might be more a reflection of the severity of the distress than anything peculiar to the infectious agent, per se. Maybe younger cohorts are more likely to clot, but before COVID-19 they rarely died or had such severe symptoms, so nobody quantified prevalence. And if so, treating the clots might not significantly reduce fatality rates; or maybe it would, not just for COVID-19 but any similar viral ailment.