How to Further Reduce the Risk of Serious COVID-19 Infections: Exploiting the Fragile Viral Envelope and the Self-Cleaning Mechanisms of Our Respiratory System
Year: 2020
Type: preprint
Abstract: Social distancing, washing hands and good hygiene are essential and currently the most potent methods available to curb down the unprecedented speed by which the new coronavirus is spreading across the globe. Even under lockdown, which is necessary to significantly reduce the number of people that get infected by an ill person, are there additional measures that each of us can embrace to even further reduce the risk of infection and the severity of the COVID-19 disease? Given the lack of licensed drugs that target SARS-CoV-2 specifically, we have to look into additional non-specific defense mechanisms that animals and humans evolved to protect themselves from pathogen invasions. The goal of this article is to describe how various of our non-specific defense mechanisms work, which actually precede the inflammatory response, and to discuss whether we can exploit the unique features of the coronavirus envelope and the self-cleaning machinery of the human respiratory tract to strengthen our self-defense. The challenge is to actively interfere with supportive measures during the short time window between getting exposed and before an inflammatory response gets initiated.
Source: Preprints.org
Author: Viola Vogel
Institutions: ETH Zurich, Institute of Translational Medicine
Language: English
Subfield: Infectious Diseases
Field: Medicine
Domain: Health Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W3013138938