I am not an epidemiologist.  I am not a virologist.  I am not a medical doctor.

Take everything I say with a grain of salt.

All my caveats aside, I have read several news articles that have made me think, and I have a theory about the Coronavirus.

The news about Coronavirus antibody tests.

From California:

Second university’s antibody tests reveal that 55-times more Californians have had coronavirus than officials have reported after Stanford study found 4% of the state’s population has been infected

From New York:

Study shows 13.9% of people tested in New York state have coronavirus antibodies, Cuomo says

From Miami:

Miami-Dade has tens of thousands of missed coronavirus infections, UM survey finds

About 6 percent of Miami-Dade’s population — about 165,000 residents — have antibodies indicating a past infection by the novel coronavirus, dwarfing the state health department’s tally of about 10,600 cases, according to preliminary study results announced by University of Miami researchers Friday.

So it seems that from antibody testing, way more people have been exposed to Coronavirus than what was previously expected.  Most of the people who are infected prevent with very mild to no symptoms.

Also news from California:

First American coronavirus deaths took place weeks before initially thought

The first American to die of COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus that has become a global pandemic, succumbed weeks earlier than initially believed, officials in California said late Tuesday.

The Santa Clara Medical Examiner-Coroner said autopsies on two people who died in early and mid-February showed they had been infected by the virus. Samples sent to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) tested positive on Tuesday.

The two people died at home on Feb. 6 and Feb. 17, making them the earliest-known victims of the coronavirus in the United States.

This shows that the virus was in the US earlier than initially believed.

I wouldn’t be surprised if we found more Coronavirus deaths as far back as December or January.  China’s first death was in November and I have a hard time believing that the virus didn’t escape China for three months.

I was sick as hell in February with a fever and cough that wouldn’t die and was tested negative for influenza, strep, and bronchitis, and I had just had a flu shot in October.  I was so sick I couldn’t move for a day.  I’m serious, I could barely roll over under the blankets, I couldn’t stand up.  I have never had body aches so bad before.  I’m pretty sure I had Coronavirus around Valentine’s day.

The anecdotes and studies on the effects of hydroxychloroquine have been inconclusive.  Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.  Some of the anecdotes suggest that hydroxychloroquine works incredibly fast, sometimes even overnight.

Hydroxychloroquine is used in the treatment of Lupus, which is an autoimmune condition.  The anti-inflammatory effects of hydroxychloroquine were what was touted as being effective against the virus.

Published literature about the effects of the virus says this:

Cytokine storm (CS) refers to excessive and uncontrolled release of pro-inflammatory cytokines. Cytokine storm syndrome can be caused by a variety of diseases, including infectious diseases, rheumatic diseases and tumor immunotherapy. Clinically, it commonly presents as systemic inflammation, multiple organ failure, and high inflammatory parameters.

The symptoms of Coronavirus vary greatly, from being a mild flu in some, to causing blood clots in others.

There is a great paper about Cytokine storm and H1N1, and what is interesting is how some biological factors in Cytokine storm are also found in autoimmune conditions.

The New York Times ran a headline:

The Coronavirus Patients Betrayed by Their Own Immune Systems

In these people, it’s their body’s response, rather than the virus, that ultimately causes harm.

Cytokine storms can overtake people of any age, but some scientists believe that they may explain why healthy young people died during the 1918 pandemic and more recently during the SARS, MERS and H1N1 epidemics. They are also a complication of various autoimmune diseases like lupus and Still’s disease, a form of arthritis. And they may offer clues as to why otherwise healthy young people with coronavirus infection are succumbing to acute respiratory distress syndrome, a common consequence of a cytokine storm.

So here is my theory:

A huge number of people are and have been exposed to Coronavirus and it’s been blowing around the for months, probably since December.

It really only hurts people with a genetic prevalence for some auto-immune conditions.  Essentially, some people have a severe allergic reaction to the virus and they die, other people don’t and they are fine.

This is why I was sick as hell.  My father had Crohn’s and ulcerative colitis.  My mother’s mother had rheumatoid arthritis.  My father and grandmother are diabetics.  I have a strong family history of autoimmune conditions.  I myself have IBS and degenerative disc disease (early-onset arthritis in my spine).

I was susceptible and my wife and kids were not.

Eventually, I believe that we will find out that nearly everyone who got seriously sick or died of Coronavirus had a predisposition to an immune system problem.  Without this predisposition, getting infected produces, at most, a mild cold.

Hydroxychloroquine will be effective as a treatment for those people who have the autoimmune factors that can be treated with Hydroxychloroquine.  If you have other immune problems that are not treatable with Hydroxychloroquine, it’s ineffective.  For example, Lupus and alopecia respond well to Hydroxychloroquine but Crohn’s does not.  Remicade, which is a treatment for Crohn’s, can cause alopecia.  Not all autoimmune conditions respond to the same drugs the same way.  This variability in immune responses to Hydroxychloroquine will explain the variations in test results.

Rather than locking people down, testing for antibodies, or carrying around immunity cards, people should be tested to see if they have the immune response factors that make someone susceptible to a severe Coronavirus response.  If they do, and if they are the type that responds well to Hydroxychloroquine, then that drug might do them very well as a prophylactic.

I have a feeling that ultimately the biggest gains against Coronavirus will be made, not by epidemiologists, but by rheumatologists.