By now everyone knows that the COVID-19 pandemic began in December 2019 in Wuhan China and rapidly extended to become a global health and economic emergency. Its etiological agent (nidana) is the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2. COVID-19 presents a wide spectrum of clinical manifestations, which ranges from an asymptomatic infection to a severe pneumonia accompanied by multisystemic failure that can lead to death. The immune response to SARS-CoV-2 is known to involve all the components of the immune system that together appear responsible for viral elimination and recovery from the infection. However, these very same immune responses are implicated in the disease's progression from a mild infection to a more severe and lethal process. This wide clinical spectrum of COVID-19 is a consequence of the correspondingly variable spectrum of the immune responses to the virus. The critical point where progression of the disease (in the conventional medical paradigm) is triggered appears to center on loss of the immune regulation between controlled protective and uncontrolled destructive responses due to an over-exuberant production of various cytokines (pro-inflammatory chemicals). As logical as this sounds, as you will see the Āyurvedic paradigm understands this critical point of progression to be very different.
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