Link to "Why Some People Get Sicker Than Others"

Kirsten sent me this interesting article from The Atlantic  (they dropped their pay wall for articles about Covid.):
"Why Some People Get Sicker Than Others: COVID-19 is proving to be a disease of the immune system. This could, in theory, be controlled."

James Hamblin, April 21, 2020

www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/04/coronavirus-immune-response/610228

"There’s a big difference in how people handle this virus,” says Robert Murphy, a professor of medicine and the director of the Center for Global Communicable Diseases at Northwestern University.
...

This degree of uncertainty has less to do with the virus itself than how our bodies respond to it. As Murphy puts it, when doctors see this sort of variation in disease severity, “that’s not the virus; that’s the host.”
...The people who get the most severely sick from COVID-19 will sometimes be unpredictable, but in many cases, they will not. They will be the same people who get sick from most every other cause.
Cytokines like IL-6 can be elevated by a single night of bad sleep. Over the course of a lifetime, the effects of daily and hourly stressors accumulate.

Ultimately, people who are unable to take time off of work when sick—or who don’t have a comfortable and quiet home, or who lack access to good food and clean air—are likely to bear the burden of severe disease."