Skinowski, if you don't mind I need some advice. I just learned that one of my daughters is going to India next Wednesday. I knew she had a trip coming up but assumed it would be April or May which is when she's gone to India before. The flight is non-stop from JFK to Mumbai, which is good, and the weather there should be in the 80's the whole three weeks, which is also good. She's just turning 40, is quite fit, and has no chronic illnesses of any kind.
What worries me is that in April of 2018, she came back from India, and about ten days later came down with typhoid fever. In two days that turned into sepsis, and then septic shock which kept her in a critical care unit for ten days. Beforehand, I had no idea how deadly sepsis can be in younger, healthy people. Her brain was the first and only organ affected. Her 32 year-old office manager was also on the trip and the same thing happened to her except the first organ was her heart, followed by her spleen.
I read the full article behind your Twitter post, and it seemed to me that it was describing a sepsis like process occuring with the Coronavirus-- the cytokine storm and 'whole-body inflammation'. What do you think? And do you have any advice if she decides to travel anyway?
<< Caixin: A 39-year-old patient in Hong Kong suffered from cardiac arrest, and his death ensued quickly. A few patients did not have severe symptoms upon the onslaught of the virus or in early stages, but they died suddenly. Some experts argue that the virus triggers a cytokine storm, which ravages the stronger immune system of young adults. Eventually excessive inflammations caused by cytokine result in the higher mortality rate. Have you seen such a phenomenon in the coronavirus outbreak?
Peng: Based on my observations, a third of patients exhibited inflammation in their whole body. It was not necessarily limited to young adults. The mechanism of a cytokine storm is about whole-body inflammation, which leads to a failure of multiple organs and quickly evolves into the terminal stage. In some fast-progressing cases, it took two to three days to progress from whole-body inflammation to the life-threatening stage.>> |
