In December 2019, the Chinese authorities notified the world that a virus was spreading through their communities. This virus is the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome – Related Coronavirus 2, that causes the disease called Covid – 19, and that everyone simply calls coronavirus.
Corona may spread via surfaces, but it is still uncertain how long it can survive on them. Its main way of spreading seems to be droplet infection when people cough, or if you touch someone who’s ill and then your face, like rubbing your eyes or nose. The virus starts its journey here, and then starts a journey deeper into the body. Its destinations are the intestines, the spleen and the lungs, where it can have the most dramatic effect. Even just a few coronavirus can cause quite a dramatic situation.
The lungs are lines with billions of epithelial cells. These are the border cells of your body, lining your organs and mucosa waiting to be infected. Corona connects to a specific receptor on its victim’s membranes to inject genetic material. The cell executes the new instructions, which are: COPY AND REASSEMBLE. It fills up with more and more copies of the original virus until it reaches a critical point and receives one final order, SELF DESTRUCT. The cell breaks open releasing coronaviruses to attack more healthy cells. The number of infected cells grows exponentially. After about ten days, millions of body cells are infected, and billions of viruses swarmed the lunges. The virus has not caused too much damage yet, but corona is now going to release a real beast on you, your own immune system.
The immune system, while there to protect you, can actually be pretty dangerous to yourself and needs tight regulation. As immune cells pour into the lungs to fight the virus, Corona infects some of them and creates confusion. Corona causes infected immune cells to overreact, and cause damage. Two kinds of cells in particular wreak havoc. First, NEUTROPHILES, which are great at killing stuff including our cells. As they arrive in their thousands, they start pumping enzymes that destroy as many friends as enemies. The other important type of cells is KILLER T-CELLS, which usually order infected cells to commit controlled suicide. Confused as they are, they start ordering healthy cells to kill themselves too.
The more and more immune cells arrive, the more damage they do and the more healthy lung tissue they kill. This might get so bad that it can cause permanent irreversible damage that leads to lifelong disabilities. In most cases the immune system slowly regains control. It kills the infected cells, intercepts the viruses trying to infect new ones and cleans up the body. Recovery begins. The majority of people infected by Corona will get through it with relatively mild symptoms. But many cases become severe or even critical.
In more severe cases million of epithelial cells have died and with them, the lungs’ protective lining is gone. That means that the interior of the lungs is open to be readily infected by bacteria. Respiration becomes hard or even fails, and patients need ventilators to survive.
There are two futures for a pandemic like Corona: slow and fast. Which future we will see depend on how we all react to it in the early days of the outbreak. A fast pandemic will be horrible and cost many lives. A slow pandemic will not cost as many lives.
The worst case scenario for a fast pandemic begins with a rapid infection; many people get sick at the same time. If the numbers get too large, healthcare systems become unable to handle it. People will die untreated, because of lack of resources to treat everybody. As more healthcare workers get sick themselves, the capacity of healthcare systems falls even further. If this becomes the case, then horrible decisions have to be made about who gets to live and who doesn’t. The number of deaths rises significantly in such a scenario.
To avoid this, the world needs to do what it takes to turn this into a slow pandemic. A pandemic is slowed down by the right responses.
In a slow pandemic everyone who gets sick gets treatment, and there is no crunch point with overwhelmed hospitals. Since we don’t have a vaccine for Corona, we have to socially engineer our behavior, to act like a social vaccine. This simply means two things: 1. Not getting infected; and 2. Not infecting others.
So you get to choose to make this a slow or a fast pandemic. I hope you will choose the fromer..
Be safe, be alert. But not Anxious.
Source: The Coronavirus Explained & What You Should Do, a video by Kurzgesagt
Watch the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtN-goy9VOY
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