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I've got a question for Joey and the other doctors on here who are seeing this first hand.
One of the peculiar aspects of this virus is how is affects different people so differently. One of my employees has a wife with chronic Crohns disease and she is so full of steroids that she has virtually no immune system at all: he always says that when she gets a mild cold is lasts a month. We found out last week that him, his wife and his two daughters (one also with Crohns) had tested positive. Naturally we were very worried. I spoke to him yesterday and they have all thankfully fully recovered and he is back at work (working remotely). He said the symptoms were bad while the fever lasted but otherwise like normal flu. Even for his wife. There are many similar stories.
But alongside the stories of vulnerable or elderly people shrugging it off quite easily there are many horror stories (some in this thread) of young, healthy, fit people ending up in ICU, or worse.
My question is.... how common is it that one virus can show such widely ranging symptoms in different patients or is there a scary prospect that the virus is already showing in different forms or different strains? At the start of this crisis there seemed to be an expected pattern - it will be very bad for elderly or immuno compromised people but not bad for younger, healthy people. That pattern seems to be changing. Do we know why?
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