Before this covid, there was a similar virus. Also in China 20 years ago. But we managed to quickly deal with that. It turned out that the current covid differs from the old one in that it is able to suppress the production of interferon by cells.
Interferon is a protective protein that puts our cells on high alert. Such cells react very nervously to viruses and resist them in every possible way.
Interferon refers to the so-called innate immunity. Well, that is, we train intelligent acquired immunity with vaccines. He hits the enemy in the most sore spots, has various vindictive cells that for a very long time cannot forgive viruses that have offended our body. This is acquired immunity. He is smart.
And then there is a relict innate immunity, which does not understand anything at all, and stupidly rushes like a beast at everything that moves.
Well, interferon is just from the same opera. This is a powerful and dangerous thing.
When covid flooded, it turned out that the patients produced this very interferon poorly. It immediately became clear that the virus was not like that. Then we found out that several different viruses in bats and other evil spirits are able to behave like this with interferon.
It turned out that all these animal viruses carry very interesting proteins that suppress the production of interferon.
Well, it's as if a virus broke into our cell, a feisty interferon would attack it, and the virus would throw a tasty bone at this interferon and so distract it.
So the size of this bone-protein is directly related to the degree of suppression of the immune system. That is, the more the virus has it… bone, the longer the interferon does not pay attention to the virus. The vicious innate immunity will be carried away by the bone.
It got to the point that due to some kind of mutation, some viruses grew to themselves an abnormally large... protein, and then people were very seriously ill.
Having rummaged in various animal viruses, scientists decided that we were still somewhat lucky with our covid, because inside bats there are "bony" viruses that are even more fun than ours.
