HOW DOES THE CORONAVIRUS DAMAGE THE BODY?

 

Una reacción inmunologíca de inflamación provoca la muerte de los pacientes.

Astore manager talks to too many customers, they arrive waiting to be attended to, for some reason they ask him some questions and a conversation starts. While talking, one of them is an asymptomatic carrier or an initial patient of COVID 19. The tiny drops of his saliva are expelled carrying millions of SARS-CoV2 viruses, which easily reach the face of the healthy person. Some of them are pulled by the nose into the nostrils and stick to their walls. There the virus finds a suitable means to infect several cells, initiating the beginning of the disease.

   The first symptom is a sore throat, which when it appears means that the virus begins to reproduce rapidly, using throat cells for them. The patient's body already has an alarm signal and general symptoms such as fever, dry cough, sore throat, loss of smell and taste or headaches and body pain appear.

   Coronaviruses, in their free state, have no life, no metabolism, do not feed, or reproduce on their own. In order to reproduce, they have to enter cells and take over all cellular metabolism and use it only to make more copies of the virus. There are so many viruses that accumulate inside the cell that break it, releasing millions of viruses to attack other cells. In this way, the virus kills, one by one, many cells, causing tissue loss.

Las medidas preventivas es lo único que se tenía al principio de la pandemia.

   The coronaviruses that we have do not cause serious illnesses, they are detained there, in the throat, and the patient only spends a few bad days when he is sick. But SARS-CoV2 is a different virus, due to its characteristics, begins to descend through the trachea until it reaches the lungs. Viruses appear to bind to receptor proteins that control blood pressure, which are most abundant in cells of the respiratory system.

   Viruses appear to bind to receptor proteins that control blood pressure, which are most abundant in cells of the respiratory system.

   The lungs are made up of millions of alveoli, which are small pockets where the air that enters the lungs reaches, they are surrounded by very thin venous capillaries, where an exchange is made, the blood leaves the CO2, to expel it from the body through breathing, and takes the oxygen the body needs. Each alveolus is lined with a single layer of cells that are also rich in blood pressure receptors.

   It is in the lungs that the disease can become fatal. As the immune system struggles with the invader, the battle itself disrupts this transfer of oxygen. Frontline white blood cells release inflammatory molecules called chemokines, which in turn summon more immune cells that attack and kill virus-infected cells, leaving a stew of fluid and dead cells, pus, that invades the lungs. This is called pneumonia, and its corresponding symptoms: cough; fever; and fast, shallow breathing.

   Weaker patients deteriorate rapidly developing a condition called acute respiratory distress syndrome (SARS). Oxygen levels in their blood drop rapidly and they struggle more and more to breathe, the walls of the alveoli break during the virus attack, decreasing the absorption of oxygen. On X-rays and CT scans, your lungs are riddled with white opacities where black space, air, should be. Commonly, these patients end up on ventilators. Many die, and autopsies show that their alveoli were filled with fluid, white blood cells, mucus, and debris from destroyed lung cells.

   Rapid drop in patients with COVID 19 is suspected to be an overreaction of the immune system known as a "cytokine storm". Cytokines signal the immune system of dangers from the disease; But in a cytokine storm, the levels of certain cytokines rise far beyond what is needed, and immune cells begin to attack healthy tissues. Blood vessels leak, blood pressure drops, clots form, and catastrophic organ failure can occur.

   High levels of these inflammation-inducing cytosines in the blood cause aggravation and death of patients.

   This causes damage to the organs. An article documented heart damage in nearly 20% of 416 patients hospitalized for COVID-19 in Wuhan, China. In another Wuhan study, 44% of the 36 patients admitted to intensive care had arrhythmias.

   Some experts believe that: "The more we look, the more likely it is that blood clots are an important player in the severity and mortality of COVID-19 disease."

   It is surprising the fact that we do not have a large number of asthmatics or patients with other respiratory diseases such as serious COVID 19 patients. They are surprised that the risk factors appear to be vascular: diabetes, obesity, age, hypertension.

   But a good number of patients are not dying from lung failure, they are dying from kidney failure, says one expert, who has treated thousands of patients with COVID-19. 27% of 85 hospitalized patients in Wuhan had kidney failure. Another reported that 59% of nearly 200 patients hospitalized with COVID-19 in the Chinese provinces of Hubei and Sichuan had protein in the urine, and 44% had blood; both suggest kidney damage. People with acute kidney injury (ARI) were more than five times as likely to die as COVID-19 patients without it. The kidney is also thought to be attacked by the virus because it has many pressure sensors in its cells.

   The brain is also damaged, but so far all are speculations that have arisen in caring for patients, with very little concrete data. The intestines are another victim of the disease and should be studied.

    Worrying data is emerging, many of the serious patients who survived the disease are said to have permanent damage to the lungs, kidneys and brain. But there is still a need to go deeper into this stage of the pandemic.