THE FIRST SET of lungs felt like rubber, says Rainer Claus, so damaged that it was impossible to imagine how any amount of oxygen could get through them. The lungs in the rest of the ten covid-19 victims that he and his colleagues at the University Medical Centre Augsburg, in Germany, autopsied in early April were in similarly awful condition. This has been, for the most part, the story around the world. People get infected with SARS-COV-2, the virus which causes covid-19, by breathing in tiny liquid droplets containing virus particles. Those particles gain entry to the lungs, where they start reproducing themselves. If the immune system does not stop it-which it mostly does-the virus causes so much damage that the lungs can no longer do their job, ending up like those in Augsburg.
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