# Covid-19 attacking the immune system? **URL:** \ **Category:** The Quarantine Zone\ **Tags:** covid-quarantine\ **Created:** [April 12, 2020, 6:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/covid-19-attacking-the-immune-system/851643 "2020-04-12T18:03:02Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 11\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Dr.Drake](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/ad7895/32.png) [@Dr.Drake](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dr.Drake)\ **Post date:** [April 12, 2020, 6:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/covid-19-attacking-the-immune-system/851643/1 "2020-04-12T18:03:02Z")
[This article](https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3079443/coronavirus-could-target-immune-system-targeting-protective?fbclid=IwAR0wAFgdyn3jwOJUcoz7toEF6tBy4I-Aa3ZPwanXD96OrPAnJhRqNhW0LzU) in the _South China Morning Post_ suggests, rather sensationally, that this virus can behave a bit like HIV. I don’t have enough science, and I’m not familiar enough with the newspaper, to be able to evaluate these claims. Does anyone know more? Is this this love child of the flu and AIDS? Or is this just fearmongering by a paper with an agenda? ---
**Author:** ![Isilder](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/cc9497/32.png) [@Isilder](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Isilder)\ **Post date:** [April 14, 2020, 2:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/covid-19-attacking-the-immune-system/851643/2 "2020-04-14T02:12:36Z")
Thats false. The bad symptoms, respiratory distress, death, is occuring even because the immune system is overreacting to the virus. But the risk of secondary infections means we can’t turn the immune system off. There’s been SARS, NL63, MERS that cause corona “acute respiratory distress” , and the other human corona viruses that cause common cold, and they don’t seem to induce AIDS. AIDS was never put down to corona virus, for example, they found HIV. No they would have found MERS and NL63 causing AIDS like symptoms … for example there are specific cancers and secondary infections that you get quickly if you get HIV related AIDS, if your immune system stops working. there is no similarity. AIDS is called a syndrome in that they could diagnose it by the set of symptoms the patient had, without even knowing that the persons also had the HIV virus in their T cells. So to say that there is a SARS related AIDS, you need the absence of other known causes immunity deficiency AND the symptoms. the chinese talk is just early talk from when there were few recoveries that the virus may have a weakness in depending on some molecule that inferferes with the human immune system. Which meant that treatment may be a correction of that situation by a different route, OR by blocking that attack, and blocking the attack might also be a short lived vaccine … block the virus as well as block the symptom. Or at least block the symptom if it only corrected the situation prophylaticly. But the people have since recovered, so the idea that we NEED a drug to correct the human system is out. There’s a non-structural component in the virus that may be coding for an active molecule … structure means the genes to produce the spike , which has a key or knife to get the virus, and the enzyme that integrates into the cell which gives the cell the function of replicating the +ve RNA of the virus … and the lipid coat that protects the RNA and binds the spikes on. As the nonstructural component will only be free to work when the cell gets busy replicaging the RNA strands and creating lipids to coat it, it seems that it wouldn’t be in the plasma of the host, it would only be something to trigger the cell into boosting this extraneous RNA replication activity inside the cell ?. Maybe it works as a boost in the 1% and does nothing in the others ? ---
**Author:** ![nearwildheaven](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/90db22/32.png) [@nearwildheaven](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/nearwildheaven)\ **Post date:** [April 14, 2020, 3:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/covid-19-attacking-the-immune-system/851643/3 "2020-04-14T03:14:43Z")
I can think of at least two other viral diseases that “attack” the immune system. For many years, it’s been known that people who recovered from measles were susceptible to other illnesses for months or even years afterwards. Back in the day, this included tuberculosis flare-ups. In recent years, we have learned that the virus itself causes a sort of amnesia of the immune system that can last for quite a while. Ebola makes its victims so dreadfully ill by shutting off the dendritic cells. In plain English, if the immune system was an orchestra, the dendritic cells would be the conductor; the rest of the immune system knows something is wrong, and goes into overdrive (cytokine storm) until it figures out what it is and the dendritic cells get working again. ---
**Author:** ![Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/13edae/32.png) [@Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Stranger_On_A_Train)\ **Post date:** [April 14, 2020, 4:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/covid-19-attacking-the-immune-system/851643/4 "2020-04-14T04:12:38Z")
Many diseases result in an overreacting or out-of-control immune response; this is due to release of an excessive amount of inflammatory cytokines, or in severe cases, cytokine release syndrome (CRS) which is also known as a “cytokine storm”. It is the reason that the 1918-1919 Spanish Flu was so deadly to younger people with healthy immune systems. Influenza is notably able to undergo a process called recombination where it swaps genes with other viruses and suddenly becomes resistant to previous immune responses and occasionally highly virulent, but it can only do this with other relatively similar influenzaviruses. It cannot recombine with totally foreign viruses any more than you could have a child with an octopus. The structure and mechanisms of the lentivirus HIV is very different from coronaviruses or influenzaviruses. It’s host tropism (that is, the cells that it is able to infect and replicate in) are CD4+ T-cells and phagocytes, and it says resident in these cells for a long time (at levels that are undetectable) until it reaches a sufficient viral load where it suddenly starts effectively turning off the immune system, allowing cancerous colonies and opportunistic infections to grow out of control. This particular bit from the article should raise some eyebrows: _The gene behind the fusion function in Sars-CoV-2 was not found in other coronaviruses in human or animals. But some deadly human viruses such as Aids and Ebola have similar sequences, prompting speculation that the novel coronavirus might have been spreading quietly in human societies for a long time before causing this pandemic._ So, first of all, AIDS (or as the article describes it, “Aids”) is not a virus; it is a syndrome caused by infection by the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV), of which there are two major species (HIV-1 and HIV-2). HIV is in the family of Retroviridae, while the ebolaviruses are of family Filoviridae. They are from completely different phylum and thus, might as well essentially be from different planets. The notion that the SARS-CoV-2 virus would have a gene common to these two unrelated families of virus but not other coronaviruses is laughable on the face. Stranger ---
**Author:** ![Senegoid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/senegoid/32/6606_2.png) [@Senegoid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Senegoid)\ **Post date:** [April 14, 2020, 5:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/covid-19-attacking-the-immune-system/851643/5 "2020-04-14T05:22:33Z")
I saw some articles about this. (Sorry, no cite at my fingertips.) No, nobody is saying that this virus is hybridizing with HIV or any other virus. It merely said that the Sars-Cov-2 virus can infect parts of the human body other than the respiratory system (we’ve already had [a thread mentioning that it can infect the digestive system](https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=894001), producing digestive symptoms, see Post #7 there), and that there was some indication that it could infect certain cells of the immune system (certain T-cells or phagocytes or whatever). If there is widespread infection of immune system cells, that could obviously damage the immune system. Thus, there is an analogy to HIV, which has a similar effect. That’s all I think I got out of the articles I saw on the subject. ---
**Author:** ![Senegoid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/senegoid/32/6606_2.png) [@Senegoid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Senegoid)\ **Post date:** [April 14, 2020, 5:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/covid-19-attacking-the-immune-system/851643/6 "2020-04-14T05:37:36Z")
Okay, I did some searching and I’m not finding quite what I thought I saw. Maybe the article I saw had it wrong, or maybe I read it wrong. I’m seeing a lot of what the above posters are saying: That there’s some indication of immune system over-reaction causing problems. I’m not finding that Sars-Cov-2 is directly infecting and destroying immune cells (like HIV does), which is what I thought I read. And nobody’s saying that all these mutually alien viruses are making whoopee with each other and hybridizing. ---
**Author:** ![Senegoid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/senegoid/32/6606_2.png) [@Senegoid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Senegoid)\ **Post date:** [April 14, 2020, 5:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/covid-19-attacking-the-immune-system/851643/7 "2020-04-14T05:58:38Z")
Oh wait a minute. Yes I did. Here’s an article that describes what OP is writing about. It appears to be derived from the same sources as the article linked by OP. The thinking seems to be that yes, the Sars-Cov-2 virus does directly attack and fatally damage T-lymphocytes. Thus the analogy with HIV, more-or-less. The article suggests that, while HIV hijacks the immune cells and forces it to manufacture more HIV, the Sars-Cov-2 virus merely damages the T-cells beyond repair. So it’s not an exact analogy to HIV. [Novel coronavirus attacks and destroys T cells, just like HIV](https://www.news-medical.net/news/20200413/Novel-coronavirus-attacks-and-destroys-T-cells-just-like-HIV.aspx), by Angela Betsaida B. Laguipo, BSN, _News Medical Life Sciences_, April 13, 2020. > [@](#): > > Surprisingly, the team has found that when the coronavirus and the T cell came into contact with each other, the T cell became prey to the coronavirus, wherein a structure in the spike of the coronavirus triggered the attachment of a viral envelope and the cell membrane. After, the genes of the virus entered the T cell and overwhelmed it, took it hostage, and deactivated its ability to protect the body. This article has some nifty electron microphotographs! ---
**Author:** ![Kimera757](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kimera757/32/3765_2.png) [@Kimera757](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kimera757)\ **Post date:** [April 14, 2020, 11:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/covid-19-attacking-the-immune-system/851643/8 "2020-04-14T11:07:30Z")
I read that it can attack the brain and can live on letters long enough to kill people weeks later. I’ve read lots of other misinformation too. The media is doing itself no favors with all this breathless and inaccurate speculation. Pretty much any statistics that are reported are false or misleading. An example would be the United States having more COVID-19 deaths than Italy. True. Italy is a **much smaller country** so that stat doesn’t tell us that the US has a higher death rate. (Exceeding the death toll in China, on the other hand, is cause for concern. China has something like four times America’s population.) Someone needs to tell me why the media is so desperate to sell fear. It backfires, and might be one reason why so many people scoff at the pandemic and hang out on crowded beaches or go to megachurches operated by con artists, etc. ---
**Author:** ![Dr.Drake](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/ad7895/32.png) [@Dr.Drake](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dr.Drake)\ **Post date:** [April 14, 2020, 5:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/covid-19-attacking-the-immune-system/851643/9 "2020-04-14T17:15:44Z")
> [@Kimera757](#): > > I read that it can attack the brain and can live on letters long enough to kill people weeks later. I’ve read lots of other misinformation too. That’s why I started this thread: I couldn’t evaluate the claims, and I wanted to know whether this was misinformation, misrepresentation of information, or reasonably accurate given what we know so far. The replies have been helpful, thank you. ---
**Author:** ![Senegoid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/senegoid/32/6606_2.png) [@Senegoid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Senegoid)\ **Post date:** [April 15, 2020, 6:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/covid-19-attacking-the-immune-system/851643/10 "2020-04-15T18:23:47Z")
There’s more. The idea that the virus directly attacks a variety of other areas of the body seems to be gaining some traction. [Coronavirus destroys lungs. But doctors are finding its damage in kidneys, hearts and elsewhere.](https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/coronavirus-destroys-lungs-but-doctors-are-finding-its-damage-in-kidneys-hearts-and-elsewhere/2020/04/14/7ff71ee0-7db1-11ea-a3ee-13e1ae0a3571_story.html), Lenny Bernstein _et al.,_, Washington Post, April 15, 2020. > [@](#): > > But clinicians around the world are seeing evidence that suggests the virus also may be causing heart inflammation, acute kidney disease, neurological malfunction, blood clots, intestinal damage and liver problems. That development has complicated treatment for the most severe cases of covid-19, the illness caused by the virus, and makes the course of recovery less certain, they said. > > The prevalence of these effects is too great to attribute them solely to the “cytokine storm,” a powerful immune-system response that attacks the body, causing severe damage, doctors and researchers said. > > ( . . . ) > > The new virus enters the cells of people who are infected by latching onto the ACE2 receptor on cell surfaces. It unquestionably attacks the cells in the respiratory tract, but there is increasing suspicion that it is using the same doorway to enter other cells. The gastrointestinal tract, for instance, contains 100 times more of these receptors than other parts of the body, and its surface area is enormous. ---
**Author:** ![Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/13edae/32.png) [@Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Stranger_On_A_Train)\ **Post date:** [April 15, 2020, 6:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/covid-19-attacking-the-immune-system/851643/11 "2020-04-15T18:53:16Z")
That is interesting (and concerning) but there is no indication there that it is attacking T-cells or other cells that are part of the adaptive immune system. Since there is relatively little clinical information it is possible that these secondary effects are a result of unknown underlying conditions or secondary infections, but it isn’t surprising that the virus might engage in occasional tropism in cells beyond the respiratory system. Until we have a better understanding of the mechanisms that the virus uses to invade cells and what genetic factors suppress or amplify them then anything is on the table, but that _South China Morning Post_ article is just a bunch of handwaving gibberish. If the SARS-Cov-2 virus were “ spreading quietly in human societies for a long time before causing this pandemic,” then we would have seen evidence in terms of a rash of idiopathic influenza-like respiratory illnesses, and we just don’t see that until after China announced the epidemic in Wuhan. Stranger