Your Immune System Could Be Hurting You as a Way of Signalling to Others JONATHAN R GOODMAN, THE CONVERSATION 13 MAY 2021 A major debate during the pandemic, and in infectious disease research more broadly, is why infected people die. No virus "wants" to kill anyone, as an epidemiologist once said to me. Like any other form of life, a virus's goal is only to survive and reproduce.
A growing body of evidence instead suggests that the human immune system – which the science writer Ed Yong says is "where intuition goes to die" – may itself be responsible for many people's deaths. In an effort to find and kill the invading virus, the body can harm major organs, including the lungs and heart. This has led some doctors to focus on attenuating an infected patient's immune response to help save them.