CHICAGO, Jan. 12 (Xinhua) -- A study of Northwestern Medicine shows that the severe complications of COVID-19 compared with other pneumonias might be related to the long course of disease rather than more severe disease.
Instead of rapidly infecting large regions of the lung within hours, like bacteria or viruses like influenza do, the virus causing COVID-19 sets up shop in multiple small areas of the lung, hijacks the lungs' own immune cells and uses them to spread across the lung over a period of many days or even weeks.