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Comment by ddek | Hacker News Reader

As a relative layperson here, this feels retrospectively obvious, no?

Per my shallow understanding (I only read the introduction to the paper), the marker hFwe-Lose is expressed by cells that are struggling, thus close to death. It's the precursor for apoptsis.

It makes sense to me that COVID affecting lung tissue would cause more apoptsis, thus more hFwe-Lose pushed out either through breath or mucus.

Is the 'news' here the discovery of the marker hFwe-Lose?

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Per the paper (https://www.embopress.org/doi/full/10.15252/emmm.202013714) the importance of this finding appears to be the discovery that hFwe-Lose concentration has greater predictive power for patient risk stratification than other methods (which notably include analysis of other biomarkers in addition to things like patient age), at least for patients who will become seriously ill.

In other words, working out who is likely to become seriously ill early on is important for physicians to provide the correct level of care; they have a number of tools to perform this asssessment already; the news is that hFwe-Lose concentration seems to be better than the rest at predicting severe outcomes.

Personally I don't think it's blindingly obvious that biomarker levels early in the course of a disease should be so very highly predictive of patient outcomes late in the course of a disease, but I am also a layperson.

There are a lot of biomarkers expressed by “struggling” cells, most of which will not correlate to disease severity, so yes, the news is that this one in particular is predictive.

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