The Coronavirus Explained
How to protect yourself
December 2019: the Chinese authorities notified the world that a virus was spreading through their communities. In the following weeks, it spread to other countries, with cases doubling within days.
What actually happens when it infects a human?
A virus is really just a hull around genetic material and proteins, not even a living thing. It can only make more of itself by entering a living cell.
Its main way of spreading seems to be droplet infection when people cough or sneezes, or if you touch someone who’s ill an the your face, like rubbing your eyes or nose. The virus starts its journey here, and then it goes deeper into the body. Its destinations are the lungs, the spleen or the intestines, where it can have the most dramatic effect.
The lungs are lined with millions of epithelial cells. These are the border cells of our body, lining your organs and mucosa waiting to be infected. Corona connects to a specific receptor on its victim’s membranes to inject its genetic material. The cell, doesn’t know what’s happening, so executes the new instructions: copy and reassemble. It fills up with more and more copies of the original virus until it reaches a critical point and receives the final order, self destruct.
The dead cell is now releasing new corona particles ready to attack more cells. The number of infected cells grow exponentially. After about 9 days, billions of body cells are infected, and billions of viruses swarmed the lungs. 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. And as immune cells pour into the lungs to fight the virus, Corona infects some of them and creates confusion. They communicate mostly via tiny proteins called cytokines. Every important immune reaction is controlled by them.
Corona causes infected immune cell to overreact and yell bloody murder. In a sense, it puts the immune system into a fighting frenzy and send way more soldiers than it should, wasting it resources and causing a lot of damage.
Two kinds of cells in particular wreak havoc.
First, neutrophils, which are great at killing stuff, including our cell. As soon as they arrive in their thousands, they start pumping out enzymes that destroy as many friends as enemies.
The other important type of cells that go into a frenzy are killer T-cells, which usually order infected cell to commit controlled suicide or apoptosis.
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 kill all the infected cells, intercepts the viruses trying to infect new ones and cleans up the battlefield. 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. We don’t know the percentage because not all cases have been identified, but we can say that there is a lot more than with the flu.
In severe cases, millions o epithelial cells have died and with them, the lung’s protective lining is gone. This means that the alveoli — tiny air sacs via where breathing occurs — can be infected by bacteria that aren’t usually a big problem. Patients get pneumonia. Respiration becomes har or even fails, and sometimes patients need ventilators to survive.
The immune system has fought at full capacity for weeks and make millions of antiviral weapons. As thousands of bacteria rapidly multiply, it is overwhelmed. They enter the blood and overrun the body; if this happens, death is very likely.
Is the Coronavirus similar to the flu?
The Corona virus is often compared to the common flu, but actually, it’s much more dangerous. While the exact death rate is hard to pin down during an ongoing pandemic, we know for sure that it’s much more contagious and spreads faster than the flu.
There are two futures for a pandemic like Corona: fast and slow.
Which future we will see depends 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 be remembered by the history books. The worst case scenario for a fast pandemic, usually begins with a very rapid rate of infection because there are no counter measures in place to slow it down. Many people get sick at the same time. If the numbers get too large, health care systems become unable to handle it.
There aren’t enough resources, like medical staff or equipment like ventilators, left to help everybody. People will die untreated. And as more health care workers get sick themselves, the capacity of health care systems falls even further. If this becomes the case, the horrible decisions will have to be made about who gets to live and who doesn’t. The number of death rises significantly in such a scenario.
To avoid this, the world — that means all of us — needs to do what it can to turn this into a slow pandemic.
A pandemic is slowed down by the right responses. Especially in the early phase, so that everyone who gets sick can get treatment and there’s no crunch pint with overwhelmed hospitals.
How you could avoid getting infected?
First of all, you should wash very well your hands. The soap is actually a powerful tool. The corona virus is encased in what is basically a layer of fat; soap breaks that fat apart and leaves it unable to infect you. It also makes your hands slippery, and with the mechanical motions of washing, viruses are ripped away.
The next thing is social distancing, which is not a nice experience, but a nice thing to do. This means: no hugging, no handshakes. If you can stay at home, stay at home to protect those who need to be out for society to function: from doctors to cashiers, or police officers;. You depend on all of them; they all depend on you to not get sick.
On a larger level, there are quarantines, which can mean different things, from travel restrictions or actual orders to stay at home.
None of this is fun. But looking at the big picture, it is a really small price to pay. Now, that the scientists have developed a lot of new kind of vaccines, we only have to do one thing; be patient. It really is all of our hands. Literally and figuratively.
