What Does Coronavirus Do To Your Body?

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The coronavirus till date has infected around 16 million individuals causing approximately 650,000 deaths. The virus is officially known as SARS-CoV-2.

SARS-CoV-2 can invade an individual’s body through their respiratory system. Either by individuals breathing in virus participles or through the direct contact with contaminated surfaces which can be passed to an individual’s oral cavity by touching their faces. Virus particles invade through the respiratory tract, they first attack the lining of individuals’ throats, airways or lungs. At this stage, the virus replicates itself or turn themselves into a “coronavirus factory”. By generating more virus particles, SARS-CoV-2 aims to infect more respiratory cells of the body. This is called the viruses’ incubation period; at this stage, the most infected individual will not develop any symptoms. Between the incubation period and time of infection on average, on day five majority of infected individuals show firsts signs of symptoms. This includes a dry cough, tiredness, fever, sore throat, loss of taste and smell, pain in the chest, etc.

The next stage of the virus is where individuals develop a mild version of the disease. SARS-CoV-2 is a mild infection for eight out of ten infected individuals. At this stage, individuals will develop core symptoms such as fever and a cough. The coronavirus cough is a dry cough which irritates the lining of the throat causing more body cells to become infected with the virus. These symptoms can be treated with bed rest, plenty of fluids and pain killer drugs.

A minority of infected individuals develop the severe form of the virus. This is due to these individual’s immunesystem overreacting to the virus which causes inflammation. Inflammation of the lungs is called pneumonia. According to a Chinese publication, this stage only affected 14% of infected individuals.