To some degree, everyone knows what COVID-19 is. It’s a novel Coronavirus—a new infectious disease that causes flu-like symptoms that can be severe enough to lead to hospitalization and possibly death.
But none of that explains what COVID-19 really is.
What is a coronavirus? How does it work? What does it do to the body? Let’s take a look.
What are Coronaviruses?
Coronaviruses are a large family of viruses. They’re called “corona” (latin for “crown”) viruses because of the spiky projections on their surface.
Coronaviruses can infect birds, mammals, and sometimes humans. They’re a very common type of virus.
In fact, if you’ve ever had a common cold (and who hasn’t?), there’s a good chance that you’ve been infected by a coronavirus before. About 20% of common colds are caused by coronaviruses.
However, this isn’t the first time this family of viruses has caused major problems. If you remember the SARS pandemic of 2002-2003 or the MERS outbreak of 2015, those were caused by coronaviruses, too.
In fact, there are so many similarities between COVID-19 and the SARS coronavirus that it’s technically called SARS-CoV-2. You won’t hear anyone refer to it that way on the street, but it just goes to show how closely related these two viruses are.
Thankfully, though, the mortality rate of COVID-19 is much lower than the mortality rate of either SARS or MERS. If those coronaviruses had spread as widely as COVID-19, the death toll might have been 2-5x higher.
That’s the good news.
The bad news is that while COVID-19 might not be as deadly as some of the other coronaviruses out there, it’s a heck of a lot deadlier than the common cold…and just as contagious.
This unique blend of traits that have made COVID-19 particularly hard to control. As a result, this novel coronavirus isn’t just affecting a country or small region—it’s affecting the world.
How COVID-19 Works
Coronaviruses are lipid-enveloped viruses. That means each individual virus is like a little self-delivering package surrounded by the same sort of membrane that protects our own cells.
Now, if you remember your high school biology, viruses aren’t technically “alive”. They reproduce, but they can’t do it on their own—they have to hijack living cells to replicate.
To watch the process in action, check out the video below.
To put it simply, the spiky projections—or “crown”—on the outside of the coronavirus are proteins that respond to specific proteins on the outside of human cells.
You can think of it like a lock and a key. When the “key” on the outside of the virus (called a “spy protein”) finds the right “lock” on the outside of a cell (called an ACE2 receptor), it clicks into place.
Once the virus locks into place, it merges with the host cell, releasing its genetic material (called RNA) into the host cell. The RNA then takes over the cell and forces it to produce new coronaviruses.
Eventually, it all proves to be too much for the host cell and it dies, releasing all of the new coronaviruses it just manufactured. From there, all of those new viruses are free to infect new cells and start the whole process over.
How COVID-19 Affects Your Lungs
Since you usually get COVID-19 by inhaling airborne droplets of water with the virus in them (released when an infected person breathes, coughs, or sneezes), the virus is designed to go after your lungs. It is a respiratory disease after all.
COVID-19 vs Your Lungs
The ACE2 receptors that COVID-19 targets seem to primarily show up on goblet cells (which produce mucus) and ciliated cells (which clear away dirt, much and…you guessed it, viruses) in the lungs.
Both of these types of cells are important parts of how your lungs protect themselves. For your lungs to work properly, they need to stay moist. That’s what your goblet cells are for.
Your lungs also need to stay clean, which is why you have ciliated cells to move stuff out of the lungs and into the throat where it is swallowed and destroyed by your stomach acid.
When these types of cells don’t do their jobs, it creates an ideal environment for COVID-19. The cells in the lungs start to dry out—making them more vulnerable to invasion—and the viruses released after a host cell dies don’t get cleared away by the cilia.
Instead, the virus has plenty of time and opportunity to infect new cells and continue the cycle of destruction.
Your Immune System vs Your Lungs
To make matters worse, once your body discovers that your lungs are infected, it goes on the warpath. However, it takes time to develop and replicate white blood cells that can specifically target COVID-19.
So, your body does what it can in the meantime. Unfortunately, it doesn’t have antibodies to tell it which cells are infected and which ones are healthy, so it just attacks everything in the area.
You can think about it like this. Antibodies are like a covert ops expert lighting up a building for a laser-guided missile. In this scenario, you can blow up the target building and leave the ones next to it standing.
But, to do that, you need a covert ops expert on the ground.
For your body, that expert is your antibodies. They light up infected cells and tell your immune system “kill this now!”
Without that covert ops expert, though, you’re shooting blind. You just have to bomb everything and hope that you hit your target.
This is what your body does to your lungs early on. It can’t distinguish healthy cells from infected ones, so it bombs everything in the area and hopes for the best.
Unfortunately, since COVID-19 is already doing a number on your goblet and ciliated cells, there isn’t a good way to clear all of resulting debris away. Your lungs get congested and you may end up with pneumonia.
If your body can’t get things under control, COVID-19 and your immune system end up punching holes in your lungs. When this happens, you develop respiratory failure and may, sadly, die.
COVID-19 Symptoms
Now that we’ve talked about how COVID-19 affects the body, the symptoms of COVID-19 should make a lot of sense.
Generally speaking, the most common symptoms will be:
- Fever (the result of your immune system ramping up)
- Shortness of breath (due to all of the junk in your lungs)
- Cough (from body trying to force all of the junk in your lungs out)
If you’re under 60 years old and aren’t at high-risk for severe illness (no lung disease, serious heart conditions, asthma, severe obesity, diabetes, kidney failure, liver disease, pregnant, etc and not immunocompromised or in a nursing home) and develop these symptoms, you’ll probably be just fine.
However, if things get really bad, you may develop the following symptoms (call your doctor if you develop any of the following):
- Trouble breathing
- Persistent pain or pressure in the chest
- Bluish lips or face
All of these symptoms are due to your lungs filling up with fluid. As a result, you can’t get enough air.
In addition, you may also experience other symptoms due to an exaggerated immune response, like unusual confusion, grogginess or increased pain sensitivity. Up to half of COVID-19 patients experience nausea, vomiting, and/or diarrhea, so that’s a possibility, too.
By the way, as a quick aside on fever, you can actually have a lot of variation in your body temperature based on time of day, where and how you are measuring, and what your personal baseline temperature is.
So, if you have a temperature of 99 degrees Farenheit, you don’t necessarily have a fever. If it pops above 100.4 degrees, though, it’s definitely something to pay attention to.
If you have manageable symptoms and you’re worried that you might have COVID-19, call your doctor—don’t go into the office without talking to a healthcare professional first. Showing up unannounced is a surefire way to spread it to other people.
If you’re experiencing more severe symptoms, call the hospital. As with visiting the doctor’s office, it’s best to give them warning in advance. That way, hospital staff can protect themselves and their patients.
All in all, COVID-19 isn’t something most people need to be scared of.
Our bodies have handled this sort of respiratory illness before. They know what they’re doing. They’ll beat this virus and many viruses to come. You may notice some symptoms if you catch COVID-19, but you’ll probably be fine.
The Problem with COVID-19
So why is COVID-19 such a big deal? Our bodies beat rhinoviruses, coronaviruses and influenza viruses every yea. Why are we so worked up about this one?
Well, the simple fact of the matter is that while you may get this coronavirus and do just fine, this virus could be a death sentence for many people—and you might just be surprised by who it claims.
For example, I’m a fit, physically active guy in my mid-thirties. Most people would look at me and think, “He’s definitely safe.”
However, I’m actually at high-risk for severe illness. I’m immunosuppressed and have an immune system disorder. Casual exposure to COVID-19 could kill me.
But no one would ever expect that.
To make matters worse, you can have COVID-19 and not even realize it. You may infect, hospitalize and possibly kill people—all without even realizing that you’re a carrier for the disease.
We’ll cover all of the potential implications of this in a future article, but it makes things pretty dangerous for people at high-risk for severe illness—and it’s part of the reason why we are seeing such rapid spread of the disease here in the USA.
Like SARS—its parent virus—catching COVID-19 can have lifelong consequences. So, if we aren’t collectively careful, our negligence can put people in the hospital…or worse.
Conclusion
All of this information is why doctors, businesses, and governments worldwide are taking COVID-19 so seriously.
As a virus, COVID-19 is incredibly good at its job. It’s highly contagious, survives for prolonged periods on surfaces, and can be transmitted to a new host before the original host is even aware that they have the virus.
Couple all that literal virality with a disease process that can maim or kill the host, and is it any wonder that we have a global pandemic on our hands?
Now that the USA has more reported cases of COVID-19 than any other country in the world, this isn’t a disease we can take lightly. COVID-19 is here to stay and, if we aren’t wise about how we respond, the effects of this novel Coronavirus on our communities, economy, and nation will be profound.
