It's Tuesday, April fourteen. I'm Oscar Ramirez from the Daily Dive podcast in Los Angeles, and this is your daily coronavirus update. Researchers are looking into how an immune system gone haywire, maybe doing the most damage and patients experience some of the most severe symptoms and even death because of COVID nineteen. This might be happening in two stages. First, the immune system fails to respond quickly enough to the virus,
then responds to aggressively and causes more damage. Joe Walker, reporter for The Wall Street Journal, joins us for why hyperactive immune response maybe making things worse. Thanks for joining us, Joe, my pleasure. We're continuing to learn more about the coronavirus and COVID nineteen. One of the things that everybody is concerned with is obviously why some people get these very severe symptoms from the virus and why some people die from it. For a long time, we've been saying people
with underlying health conditions are more at risk. You know, it just seems to kind of create this perfect storm. But also included all of this is the immune response for every person that could be different due to genetics. And other reasons, but an immune system that goes haywire could be eyed and why some people are dying from the coronavirus. Joe tell us a little bit about this. The idea here, right, is that COVID nineteen is flu
like symptoms that are really really bad. We all know that my headache, coughing, fatigue, all this kind of stuff, right, pneumonia really terrible symptoms. But most people get over those symptoms, you know, their immune system does the job for them. And then you have this like maybe fifteen people who end up on ventilators and some of them die, and people increasingly think that what's happening there is that it's not so much the virus anymore. The person's own body
and their own immune response is just going haywire. It's overreacting, essentially, it's doing too much too fast, and what it's doing is basically creating this mechanism whereby fluids seep into the lungs and fill them up like wounds, and you end up in a situation called acute respiratory distress syndrome, which basically means you can't breathe, your organs can't get oxygen, and barring intervention, you die from respiratory failure, and doctors
think that there's two stages to this. Two steps. So the first is the lag your immune system is kind of lagging in attacking it, and then once it sees that it's there, then it goes and overcompensates. And then this is the part where it can become a problem where your immune system is going overboard and it's actually destroying healthy cells in addition to trying to fight the virus.
Exactly the way when researcher pointed out to me was like if you have a ride in the streets, you know, and you send your local police there, but it's just way too much, the riots, way out of control, and so then you send in the riot police. But like at that point everything is just chaos and it's just a mess because you didn't send in the right authority of the right police force soon enough, and so then
everything just kind of is mayhem. So the way that you described it in this sort of two stage process does seem to be what happens to a portion of patients that end up getting really sick and some of them die, and this whole moment of chaos in the body with the immune system. Doctors and scientists they call it a cytokine storm. So it's kind of this perfect storm of chaos going on in the body, and they're eyeing certain drugs. I don't know if they're full on.
Immunosuppressants are certain things that can target these things to maybe help calm that part down in an effort to not have the body go hey wire that way. So cyted kinds are these proteins that your immune system uses to fight off infections to help keep you healthy when you're sick. Right, there's a bunch of different ones and usually they're good things, right, But when they use this,
some kind of goes crazy. Like this, it's putting way too many of the cided kinds into your body all at once, and that's what's sort of causing the problems. And so there are a number of drugs that people are testing right now. I'd say the most advanced are these two medicines that are both the per if The one is called that Camera and the other one is
called Czara. They're both on the market for other conditions, but they blocked these one kind of sided kind of particular called Aisle six, and so the hope is that if you can block this one side of kind that looks like it's playing a role in these negative effects you're having, that I could kind of quiet this storm and help take all this pressure off the body so
that can actually fight the virus again. You know. And we write in the article about some pretty encouraging anecdotal results about people being treated with these drugs and having really good results. And we have to be very clear on this. There's a lot of talk about different drugs going on. Hydroxy Chloroquine is one that the President likes to talk about. People have hit or miss evidence with it.
That's something more that people are saying, take it beforehand or early on when you get COVID nineteen for people that have really really bad symptoms. These are for people where the body is actually starting to do harm to itself. So it's kind of on a different spectrum. I think that's right, because you know, look, all drugs have side effects, and you never know exactly how bad each persons side effects will be, so it's not the kind of thing you really just want to like fool around with and
take for giggles. And so with these words, we're talking about the target the immune system in particular. Um, you want to be really careful. I will just say though, that one of the tricky things about this disease is that the cytokine's storm process seems to happen really quickly. So it's not as though you're totally healthy one day
and then out eventilator the next. But they can be like, you're pretty sick, you're pretty sick, and then all of a sudden, you're kind of having trouble breathing, and then that's really when I think doctors are saying that they think these types of drugs might be most beneficial. So you really want to try to catch it at the right time, even while being careful about not kind of giving them out. Willy Newly to everybody. Joe Walker, reporter for The Wall Street Journal, thank you very much for
joining us. Thank you my pleasure. I'm Oscar Ramirez and this has been your daily coronavirus update. Don't forget that. For today's big stories, you can check me out on the Daily Dive podcast every Monday through Friday, So follow us on I Heart Radio or wherever you get your podcast right