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Comment by MrBuddyCasino | Hacker News Reader

There is a hypothesis [0] that the virus attacks red blood cells and impacts their capacity to transport O2, and that the lung damage is actually caused by that, and not directly by the virus. Elevated heart rate makes a lot of sense.

[0] see thread and linked paper: https://twitter.com/yishan/status/1244717172871409666

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> There is a theory [0] (unproven!)

Would it be more appropriate then to call it a hypothesis?

This is my understanding as well, would love if an expert could weigh in on the question.

No, "theory" is simply a provable "hypothesis". Doesn't have to be proven, just provable.

The thing is, a theory can never be completely proven. We can never completely discount the possibility of making a new observation or experiment that disproves the theory (hence "falsifiability").

That's why, for example, the "germ theory" is a correct term, even though its probability of being correct is so close to 100% that we could just call it the "truth".

Reference?

Preprint is here: https://chemrxiv.org/articles/COVID-19_Disease_ORF8_and_Surf...

The study seems to be based entirely on computational modeling. As far as I know, there is no direct "wet lab" experimental evidence for its hypothesis. Hopefully people will investigate further soon.

So that's worth just about nothing then for now. Thank you.

Note that yishan is not a doctor and the study he referenced is entirely in silico, not in vitro.

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