Viruses lyse (explode) the cells they take over in order to exit the cell, since packaging for membrane transport is much more complicated. Unchecked, they wou

Viruses lyse (explode) the cells they take over in order to exit the cell, since packaging for membrane transport is much more complicated. Unchecked, they would just exponentially destroy your tissue. Cytokine storm responses are a particular kind of immune system over-reaction that can make relatively benign viruses much more dangerous to a healthy host then a more immunologically suppressed host, but that's not the behaviour of COVID-19 which is showing pretty standard lethality profiles.