Hacker News Reader

Comment by coldcode | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if there is something in your immune system, maybe genetic or your viral experience, that determines how well your body will cope with this new virus. There are reports of really old people (I read a 103 and 99 year old's stories) who recovered from a bout, yet my niece lost a 30 year old friend.

I guess its like debugging an app you have never seen and the source code is in a language you barely know; everything seems like a clue as to what is going wrong, yet much of what you think it's doing is simply a mystery because you don't understand enough.

Even in 2020 there are mysteries in the human body we simply don't understand yet.

View on HN

This was very true for the H1N1 epidemic but it's not clear something like this is happening with Covid. If anything, the opposite might be happening where prior infection with a related virus makes the current infection much worse.

Do you have any sources for that last sentence?

What kind of source would satisfy you for "the opposite might be happening..."?

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7102551/

Thank you, that is super interesting.

I wonder how valid this bit still is:

> the discrepancy between the severity of cases observed in the Hubei province of China and those occurring elsewhere in the world

I think at this point we’ve already seen very severe cases in many other countries, no? I don’t have proper sources though, just thinking of misc news articles I’ve read.

From my layman understanding the initial viral load is a strong factor in how well you can respond to the infection. Immune response more or less happens in a constant time, while the unchecked virus spreads roughly exponentially. If your initial load was low, then by the time your immune system responds, the infection will be relatively little spread, but if your initial load was high, the virus will have spread much more, which can be challenging for the immune system to handle, event for healthier people.

Ya inflammation. See my post above.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com