How does the coronavirus kill?

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These are the symptoms of coronavirus 0:31

(CNN Spanish) - We know of the slight symptoms of the coronavirus: headache and sore throat, discomfort and cough.

If we are healthy, our immune system is trained to fight them, but things can get complicated.

Because the coronavirus affects the upper and lower human respiratory system.

In the superior one, the virus penetrates mainly through the nostrils and the mouth, but it can descend through our trachea to the inferior system, that is, to the lungs.

What the virus does is hijack healthy cells and reprogram them to make more copies of the virus, and so the infection begins to spread.

First, it may affect the epithelial protection of our trachea and lung tissue, destroying the cells that clean our lungs of secretions and debris.

This can cause the areas, now unprotected, to also be a breeding ground for bacteria and common germs.

Faced with this double infection, our immune system is on guard and responds with attacks on the virus and infected cells.

To do this, it sends an army of immune cells to fight the virus and repair the damage caused to the lung tissue. This causes an inflammation in the pulmonary alveoli that is usually normal.

But our immune system may be overly aggressive and attack healthy lung tissue cells as well, so the system that supposedly protects us is actually doing us more harm.

In addition, the damaged blood vessels in this battle allow liquid to filter into the lung tissues, puddling them and causing those white spots that we see on x-rays. I mean, we have pneumonia.

This puddling drowns out the air sacs of the lungs, which in turn hinder the passage of oxygen into the blood.

All of this can also lead to injury to the lungs, damage that reduces the patient's lung capacity and can be permanent. In some cases the patient may no longer be able to breathe on his own because the inflammation blocks the bronchi and alveoli, and need to be assisted with mechanical ventilation to help you with pure oxygen.

In the most serious cases, a serious immune reaction occurs in which our body's defense system produces a brutal series of chemicals to fight the virus. Chemicals that eventually affect the rest of the organs, which begin to cascade. And from there, death.