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Comment by Dumblydorr | Hacker News Reader

This virus is uncommonly indiscriminate in how many organ systems it damages. This may be due to its ability to deoxygenate a patient, systemic auto-immune response, systemic inflammation or vasculitis in organs, stroke like events with blood clots in multiple events, etc. What a beast of a virus!

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Other coronaviruses can infect the nervous system. In fact, there were papers out in 2018 describing neural infections by "human coronavirus".

Cytokine storms and their associated effects (like clotting ,etc.) are also present with other viral infections, like with the original Spanish Flu H1N1 strain (during the infamous "second wave").

"Regular" pneumonia can severely weaken you for months or a year, even if you have antibiotics.

This virus is absolutely not a magic virus. It is novel, but it is still a coronavirus.

The problems could be related with the fact that pangolins have an unique and strange immune system. Reduced in comparison with most other mammals (but I'm speculating...)

This virus definitely looks as if it had ample time to adapt to human host. Just many early cases were probably undetected or misattributed.

Immune systems are fairly differentiated across species, even for common mechanisms. Source: I worked from 2009 to 2011 in a project aiming at reconstructing part of these mechanisms in certain immune cells, and the differences between human and mice, where some models were made, were significant.

My frustration with articles like this is that they fail to point this out adequately. These problems are significant on their own, but they do not necessarily warrant this virus being treated differently from others.

The things that warrant the separate treatment are still the high death rate, high hospitalization rate, and potential for large spread across a population with little existing immunity.

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