COVID 19: How does the virus affect your body?

By Aarit Atreja

At the end of the year 2019, the Chinese government told the world that a virus was spreading through China. It originated in Wuhan and rapidly started to spread to other countries in the world forming a pandemic instead of an epidemic. An epidemic is when a disease is contained only in one continent, but a pandemic is when it spreads to multiple continents. The viruses’ name is Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome-Related Coronavirus 2. But, you can just call it Covid-19, or Covid for short. A virus is really just a capsule with some genetic code and proteins. Some consider it not even a living thing. It can only reproduce inside another organism. They can spread on many surfaces, and Covid can stay up to three days on plastic surfaces! Since that is a long time, people can disinfect surfaces with alcohol, or alcohol wipes. Covid is a droplet infection, so it can spread by coughing, sneezing, or face touching. Like if you rub your eyes or nose. Covid then starts to spread in your body targeting the intestines, spleen, or lungs because there it can have the most disastrous effect. Even a little amount of viruses can do a lot of damage, so it pays to be safe. The lungs have billions of epithelial cells, they are the border, lining your organs waiting to be infected by Covid. Corona attaches itself to a special receptor on its victim’s membranes, or skin, to inject its genetic material. The cell, no matter which cell it is, makes more and more copies of Covid until it dies, gets targeted by the  Killer T-Cells, or gets the Self-Destruct order. This happens for some time until there is a substantial amount of Covid in your body. Then it starts to infect your immune system. Cells communicate with cytokines, they are essential for your body to function properly and Covid sends out angry cytokines which make the cells send too many forces, its like holding a grudge in capture the flag and while you go for one person, you lose all of your teammates into jail, and then someone steals you your flag. The two best cells at doing this are neutrophils and Killer T-Cells. Killer T-Cells usually order infected cells to die, but when they are infected with coronavirus, they order perfectly healthy cells to commit suicide too. Neutrophils kill other cells by pumping out enzymes that kill cells, but like Killer T-Cells, they can kill healthy cells too. Both of these together can lead to mass destruction. But after this, the body gets better at recognizing infected cells from healthy ones. This can fight back covid and lead to recovery. Most people only get a fever or a dry cough through covid, but others can lead to death. Patients with severe symptoms could get pneumonia, shortness of breath, and some of these people will need ventilators to survive. Also, as your immune system and covid weaken each other, simple bacteria could take advantage of this situation and overcome your immune system. If this happens death is likely. But, the good news is that we have a vaccine. Pfizer is the only vaccine so far approved for use by the FDA. If you don’t know what a vaccine is, click this link. 

The main source for this article is Kurzegat’s video on Covid-19. Here is the link. A secondary source was Anthony Fauci’s video about Covid. The link is here.

Thank you for reading.