This would be the proper description for the spanish flu. But with Covid-19 it's different. No cykotine, but BK overreaction. Healthy immune systems are not triggered to kill the body, only weak and old are in danger. Besides the neurological damage in some.

And this is why steroids like decadron are helpful in the second phase (now being called the inflammatory phase by many in the ID community) of the infection. Steroids decrease inflammation / immune response.

I've been doing some lab & modeling research on this, and it's more complex. I think it's a non-linear dynamics problem.

In a nutshell, SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) does block interferon response by using molecular mimics. Some of the proteins encoded in the virus are really similar to proteins in the interferon pathway, so this is not surprising. Still pretty unexplored and a nice route towards finding treatments.

Now, the interesting part is that the dynamics of interferon is very non-linear. Cells exchange interferon signals with other cells in the same tissue to pass information and coordinate with the immune system. There are fairly sophisticated models (using stochastic message passing!) that confirm lab observations on regular non-infected cells [1].

My hypothesis is that by blocking interferon in a sufficient number of cells on individuals with already disrupted innate immunity (due to ageing, insulin resistance, etc.) the system becomes chaotic. Infection by e.g. pneumococci is tolerated because the signaling is perturbed and then, all of a sudden, you get a massive amount of proinflammatory molecules secreted and cells decide to undergo apoptosis. That's the cytokine storm that everyone talks about.

Sadly, pursuing these ideas within academia is hard as most (but not all) biology labs are really hostile to mathematical models, even if they explain or predict things they can't using hand waving. Perhaps I should seek VC funding.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-017-02640-8

> Why do journalists write like this?

The New Yorker is known for that style, it may even be the prime example of it.

People who don't like that style are not the audience. And there are many people who like it.

It's like asking why Linux Weekly News never runs poetry. Because it's not that kind of publication.

I find NPR guilty of the same. I want to hear a story about how fear affects the lives of primates. And it begins on a cool October day with thoughts of coffee.

This is 'Long Form Journalism'. The 'dip in, dip out' paragraph structure is a dead giveaway.

Not always what you're looking for but it can be a good way of cracking into a subject you're unfamiliar with, or a good way of merging the human element with something that would otherwise be quite dry.

By no means a substitute for regular news, but a good complement to it.

I suspect that it's a holdover from the past. There once was a time when many people had more time to read than they had stuff to read. This kind of writing was fine. Better than right-to-the-point writing, in fact, because it expanded the amount to be read without actually needing to have more to say.

Alternately, it's a way of expanding readership. If you don't know anything about molecular biology, they have to write an article at a layperson's level to explain what they mean. But if you, the reader, don't want to go through the effort of trying to understand even that, then there's this human-interest stuff that may still cause you to decide to buy their magazine.

> Why do journalists write like this?

It's journalists writing for other journalists.

Logorrhoea.

In French, “logorrhée”, means literally “verbal diarrhoea”.

It’s symptomatic of people who have not much to say.

The real question is who buys this BS?

George Orwell is turning in his grave...

You can condense the facts into 3 paragraphs but why don't we just go all in and present them as bullet points instead of full sentences?

When I see a five page article, I know that I'll get background information and I might discover something I didn't expect from the title. While you might only be looking for the study results, I like spending my Sunday afternoon reading long articles teaching me all kinds of interesting information I wouldn't have looked up on my own.

Cosmos was written in a similar style. Try reading it in Carl Sagan's voice and see if it's any more interesting to you.

The purpose of longform writing is to provide flavour and context, which are important parts of an information diet. Not everything has to be about the freshest facts delivered to your brain as urgently as possible. Just because you've happened across this in a frenzied binge of clicking HN headlines, doesn't mean it was designed to be consumed that way. If you don't feel you have time to sit through a New Yorker article, save it for later.

Be kind! The author is a long-time HN user and is probably reading this.

I'd wholeheartedly agree with your critique if the text was published as a tweet storm.

The thing is, this isn't news reporting at all. It's a popsci writeup of the history of the immune system, the history of the discovery of the immune system and a glimpse into its complexity that uses Covid news as the textual equivalent of a cover image. If you have a print of 20000 Leagues under the Sea and the cover shows the kraken attack, would you complain about the number of chapters that don't contain a kraken at all?

It's because students are being admitted to universities (including ivy league ones) based on informal political quotas. Once inside they don't learn per se but are indoctrinated with the virtues of diversity and tolerance. Nobody should be amazed that when they graduate, they write like a 12 year old: that was the whole point.