Researchers reported in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in Science News, COVID-19 pandemic has taught us several lessons and some of them are puzzling. Usually, the mix of two diseases in a single organ system makes it worse.
Thus, as theCOVID-19 pandemic progressed, scientists feared that coronavirus infections would take a larger toll among asthma sufferers. Interestingly, now the data are piling up to show that people with allergic asthma aren’t developing severe COVID-19 as often as expected, rather the condition seemed to help fend off the coronavirus. As reported in the prestigious journal PNAS, the main reason for making allergic asthma victims less susceptible to COVID-19 seems to be because of the same immune proteins triggering excess mucus production and closing of airways in people with asthma eliciting a robust shield around vulnerable airway cells preventing SARS-CoV-2 lodging onto it.
There was direct microscopic evidence that the mucous-producing cells called goblet cells, which don’t have cilia, were rarely infected compared to the cells having cilia. The movement of intact cilia is necessary to move mucous, and anything stuck in the mucus, out of the lungs. SARS-CoV-2 infected cilia are just filled with viruses and release all the viruses in to the lung rather than expelling them out of the lungs.
