I have a relatively mild form of cystic fibrosis. I don't have any of the 100 most common alleles and was diagnosed late in life. Insurance denied my pulmonologist's request for a more comprehensive genetic paneling covering the 1400 or so known alleles.
I was just happy to have a better label than "hypochondriac" and was responding well to treatment and was fighting for my life. I shrugged and thought nothing of it, but that detail undermines my credibility in the CF community. (I mean the fact that I don't know my alleles.)
I was diagnosed nearly 19 years ago and I have been steadily getting better using dietary and lifestyle interventions. I know a lot about things like inflammation in the lungs and how to manage it.
At this point, I most likely have the infection and have had it for a while, though that only recently became clear to me because I'm largely asymptomatic.
The most prominent symptom I do have is that my energy levels are low in a way that suggests a bottleneck in the system on energy supply. Impaired oxygen availability would fit with what I'm experiencing.
I have a history of anemia and it is somewhat similar to that.
My lungs are clearer than they have been in weeks. I had a mold exposure earlier this year and spent weeks coughing up a lot of phlegm multiple times per day.
At the moment and in the last couple of weeks, my lungs aren't all gunked up and my chronic inflammation is currently very well controlled.
But we are all three (me and my sons, one of whom also has atypical CF) sucking down zinc-rich foods. And we feel notably better after eating.
So your remarks hit a nerve for me.
I'm not suggesting it's the entire answer. But CF is, itself, a bottleneck in the system at the cellular level. The mechanism causing the condition is a defective channel that handles traffic of certain molecules into and out of the cell.
That's what is known by medical science and it has been enormously helpful information for me. Beyond that, my mental models for what is going on with my body depart from current medical dogma and I get attacked and dismissed a lot as a loon because I'm a former homemaker, not a doctor.
But I'm extremely familiar with what it feels like to have a bottleneck in the system and this feels to me like a bottleneck in the system somewhere. And it's not lung function per se. I'm not having any breathing difficulties at all.
This is why I think Coronavirus is impairing oxygen uptake somehow in terms of some biochemical pathway.
I work from home, part time and when I feel like it. I'm poor, but I have a lot of control over my schedule.
My sons and I are lazing about a lot and struggling to come up with the energy to take care of what few tasks must be done daily. But with pollution levels down and no pressure to perform, we are managing to not end up in serious crisis. We just aren't pushing ourselves.
With a bottleneck in the system, you can't readily recover from stress events. You don't have the capacity.
For normal people who are used to being able to push themselves to do something when they don't feel well, a bottleneck in the system would create a potentially deadly problem where pushing themselves could be a cataclysmic event from which they cannot recover.
If there is a bottleneck, you have to slow down, take it easy, don't push. You have to take pressure off the system by lowering demand.
You have to max out support of all other areas that might impinge on the system in a way that would further narrow the bottleneck. I'm still doing lung clearance multiple times per day. I'm not bringing up much, but I'm keeping my lungs clear of obstruction because any obstruction further narrows the bottleneck.
So other things, like fluid in the lungs or inflammation, would further narrow the bottleneck. But clearing those additional burdens on the system doesn't, per se, fix the problem. It just lets the body get as much throughput through the bottleneck as possible.
My impression currently is that zinc consumption is easing the bottleneck itself. It's opening up capacity modestly, though it's certainly not a cure. It's just a means to keep energy levels up enough to not be a dire problem.
Please, if you can think of or learn of anything in terms of how Coronavirus impacts cell function that may cast light on interference with oxygen uptake at the biological pathway level (as opposed to mechanically in the lungs, which is what ventilators are trying to address and failing), shoot me an email. My email is in my profile.