The studies began to fit together, like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle: the virus was most deadly when it infected a host whose early antiviral response had been functionally paralyzed—like “a raider that had come into an unlocked house,” as one writer described it. The pathogenicity of SARS-COV2, in short, perhaps lay precisely in its ability to dupe cells into believing that it is not pathogenic. More data poured in. The infected host cell, with its impaired ability to send out an initial danger signal, wasn’t simply an “unlocked house.” Rather, it was an unlocked house with not one but two
The studies began to fit together, like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle: the virus was most deadly when it infected a host whose early antiviral response had been functionally paralyzed—like “a raider that had come into an unlocked house,” as one writer described it. The pathogenicity of SARS-COV2, in short, perhaps lay precisely in its ability to dupe cells into believing that it is not pathogenic. More data poured in. The infected host cell, with its impaired ability to send out an initial danger signal, wasn’t simply an “unlocked house.” Rather, it was an unlocked house with not one but two dysfunctional alarm systems. It couldn’t summon an early alert—type 1 interferon, among the signals—but as the house burned, the cell yanked the trigger on a powerful, second alarm, sending out a separate series of danger signals—cytokines—to summon immune cells. An uncoordinated army of cells—confused, bamboozled soldiers—surged into the sites of infection and started a carpet-bombing program. It was too much, too late. The trigger-happy immune cells poured out a fog of toxins to contain the virus. The war against the virus—as much as the virus itself—became an escalating crisis. The lungs were bogged with fluid; debris from dead cells clogged the air sacs. “There appears to be a fork in the road to immunity to Covid-19 that determines disease outcome,” Iwasaki told me. “If you mount a robust innate immune response during the early phase of infection [presumably via an intact type 1 inter...
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That reminds me of one the reasons the 1918 pandemic was so bad for otherwise healthy, young to middle aged people: their immune systems went WAY OVERBOARD in trying to kill the virus and ended up causing too much collateral damage to the body.
