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Comment by ThrowItAway2Day | Hacker News Reader

I remember how shocked I was when I first read about the increase in strokes associated with covid-19. Every time I read a new development about what the virus can do, I'm just dumbfounded. Either the virus is mutating, it has multiple drastically strands, or there is so much we still don't know about it. Either way, it makes me very hesitant about going out even if things are opened up.

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I'm confused about why everyone is surprised that something that elicits an inflammatory response in the body can increase your risk of blood clots. Increased inflammation -> increased clotting in a number of diseases, not limited to coronavirus. A quick literature search reveals that this is the case for a other viruses and autoimmune diseases.

This was a particularly enlightening paragraph from StatPearls: There is an interplay between inflammation and the coagulation system. Inflammation triggers a hypercoagulable state.[45] Endotoxin activates the complement system leading to thrombocytopenia and hypercoagulability.[46] The relation between inflammation and coagulation can be observed clinically in patients with purpura, vasculitis, and septic thromboembolism.[47][48] Coagulation helps to limit the expansion of infection, and some bacteria use fibrinolytic properties to oppose this response. Autoimmune diseases like systemic lupus erythematosus, immune thrombocytopenic purpura, polyarteritis nodosa, polymyositis, dermatomyositis, inflammatory bowel disease, and Behcet's syndrome increase the risk of thrombotic events.[49][50][51] The cytomegaly virus (CMV) has correlations to atherogenesis through a change of the cellular lipid metabolism and leukocyte adherence.[52]

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK538251/

According to the literature I have read, there is no evidence that Its mutating rapidly, nor is there multiple distinct strands. The increase in strokes is real, but your risk if you are <60 years old of having one is still vanishingly small. We don’t know much about the virus, nor will we for a while. Knowing things is hard, science takes a long time. We still don’t fully understand many of the pathogens that have been around for all of our collective lifetimes, so you shouldn’t expect us to be able to fully characterize one that just showed up a few months ago. What we do know from places which have been hit very hard, like bergamot is that if you are less than 60 your chance of dying from the virus is about the same as that of your risk for dying in a year, which if you are young and don’t have co morbidities is a very small number.

My (armchair) assumption is that we are still learning.

I'm reminded of the film, "The Andromeda Strain" (1971) — such an intelligent movie. Still feels cogent almost 50 years later.

Based off a fantastic Crichton book, fwiw.

There seems to be a through-line that the whole thing is related to clotting and coagulation. That basically it's not destroying lung tissue so much as preventing the blood from properly absorbing oxygen from the lungs.

I don't think it's mutating. I think it's just very novel, and also came with its own red herring in the form of the respiratory symptoms. Doctors treated the problem in front of them and assumed it was like other things they'd seen, when in reality that was just the tip of the iceberg. But it's reassuring to me to see discoveries being made and treatment evolving. I think the disease will become much less deadly long before we have a vaccine, just due to new discoveries in how to treat it.

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