[thaumaturgy]

There is as yet insufficient information on exactly what covid19 does to our biology, and consequently there is a lot of guesswork and misinformation flying around. Researchers are in hair-on-fire triage mode, there's an enormous amount of pressure to just "figure it out", people keep forgetting that the first word for this infection's official name is "novel", and they keep likening it to things that they do understand even though it's not really any of those things.

So we don't know. Nobody does right now. It takes time. It is really unfortunate that it keeps getting compared to other diseases. It's a lot like encountering malaria for the first time and saying "it's basically yellow fever". We should be behaving as though there's a mysterious new illness sweeping through populations across the world, with unknown short-term and long-term effects, because that's exactly what's happening.

The earliest severe cases all presented as pneumonia, so this disease got treated that way. But, it was quickly discovered that the pneumonia didn't behave quite like normal cases of pneumonia, and then shortly after that, there turned out to be a strong correlation with cardiac and stroke events. So, although people still think of this as a respiratory disease, there is something else going on, we just don't know what yet.