[g3e0]

There was a post about this doing the rounds yesterday. Annoyingly it was posted on Medium and has since been removed, but a copy of it, along with some interesting discussion, can be found here: http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/index.php/2020/04/05/wuhan-f...

The hypothesis is that the virus is somehow attacking the hemoglobin, stopping it from being able to carry oxygen AND releasing a toxic form of iron, both of which eventually cause organ failure.

I am not a doctor, but if this hypothesis is true, it could explain why the death rate for those who end up on a ventilator is so high. If your immune system doesn’t fight the infection off fast enough, eventually your blood becomes incapable of carrying oxygen. At this point, a ventilator won’t help you, you would need a blood transfusion containing healthy hemoglobin.

The tone of the post was that we are currently fighting the wrong disease - treating Covid-19 like we would treat pneumonia, when it is actually something unique.

[withinboredom]

After seeing it develop in my wife, and later myself, I can confirm that it “appears like malaria” in that in comes in waves (much like a blood disease like malaria). There could be some truth to this, but it could also be personal bias seeing a pattern that isn’t there.

[morebytes]

I too read that blog post and the supposed science that the author purports, which caused me to search for some scientific explanations and found this article by two Chinese Scientists: https://bit.ly/2VaR39G