From my very basic understanding as an interested electronic engineer, while symptomatically pulmonary for the most part, COVID is a largely cardiovascular disease. Medical professionals please correct me if I'm wrong, but I've read that the most dangerous symptom, pneumonia, stems from fluid leaking into the lungs due to dilation of the blood vessels, along with causing joint pain, loss of taste and smell, and swollen limbs.
COVID's most dangerous symptom is a condition called cytokine storm[1].
Cytokines are molecules used by the immune system as a means for communication, such as calling for help, cell destruction and more.
COVID creates a "storm" of signals, driving the immune system crazy. As a part of the immune system reaction to those signals, inflammation can occur (as a way to isolate and fight a specific infected zone).
During this attack, the immune system sends out cells from the blood and into the organs[2], making the blood vessels more permeable. I'm not certain but I believe that's the cardiovascular symptoms you're referring to.
From my even more basic understanding, the "vascular" part comes from covid affection for epithelial cell receptors, epithelial cells being about everywhere in your body (that's why it can propagate from nose to brain). I assumed the liver had similar tissue lining it's entry points.
I'm trying to understand our comment and failing. When I get a common cold or flu, of which I have had hundreds in my 4 decades of life, I don't think I once ended up with organ scarring. What are you on?
Just because you don't think you've had organ scarring doesn't mean you haven't. The difference is that most people don't worry about organ damage that is mostly negligible and never talked about. You don't automatically get diagnosed with a chronic disease in the presence of the smallest amount of scar tissue on any one organ and with (one number I found suggesting) 40% of industrial nations deaths having fibrosis as a contributing factor, you can bet that many people have organ scarring that is negligible.
It's hard for me to see "X gets more funding" as something to celebrate. Funding is essentially zero sum so that just means something else is now less funded as a consequence.
I hope you are wrong about <50%, but you may be right. I'd be curious as to a reasonable lower bound of human knowledge about human biology; do we know at least 25% of the fundamentals?
So I’d actually disagree. I think we know most of the fundamental principles of biology. The basic ideas underlying genome replication, RNA expression, and protein translation are very well understood. These are the core defining processes of life and we’ve basically figured out their most important, most highly conserved interactions.
The trick with biology is figuring out how these processes are controlled. Every aspect of cellular behavior has absolutely enormous combinatorial complexity. Take the EGFR protein for example. Its a receptor protein that seems to be important in controlling growth of cells. The EGFR protein has (I believe) at least twenty different locations that it can be modified. Each modification changes it’s shape and the other proteins that it can interact with. Each combination of interactions, in fact. So this one protein has at least a million different possible variants. Then consider that there are at least 20k different human genes and there are many many different ways that interactions between proteins, genes, and RNA are modified and regulated. Again, all the fundamental processes are understood, like we understand how EGFR gets modified. These processes are combined and remixed in an absolutely astronomically huge variety of ways.
A big problem right now in biology is the framing of these fundamentals in education. We know some things, but they're typically presented fairly piecewise in higher education.
One example of the fragmentation:
You're in an oncology lab? - study this particular protein and DNA damage association - but cell cycle is downplayed. Or vice versa. There's a lot of segmentation that goes on when the processes are really part of the same system.
In terms of fundamentals, I think we really need to switch towards starting biology education with just the pieces of the minimally viable cell. By using this as a tool to base everything upon, we can make biology a bit more scientific, rather than just the list of observations that it tends to swing towards today.
