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What they NEED to do is Star Trek: Howl.
Whats the difference between this version and the one revealed by court proceedings in 2015?
Ah yes, speaking the language of a b-side movie, very serious and scientific article.
Cut out the “zombie” shit, and it’s fairly scary and accurate. Filamentous cellular morphology could easily behave this way, and in fact is often used this way by filopodous amoebae. Well, lysosomes instead of virions, but still.
The cancer part is scare mongering, because the fucked up morphology is due to viral load, and an effective antiviral course would cause them to return to normal function. Temporarily larger than normal, with possible related symptoms in rare cases... but cancerous, not likely.
More likely to create a very different kind of abnormal cell that gets very large but never reproduces. These are common after many, many viral infections. Check the swelling/clumping, Syncitium, and Focal Degeneration (sounds like the COVID cytopathy is a weird mix of the three, and the cellular spread is most similar to focal degeneration) entries: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cytopathic_effect
And you’ll note that non-degenerative/destructive cytopathy doesn’t make a cell dangerous independent of the viral infection, or kill it. There are exceptions, but just for a good example: HPV is oncogenic and isn’t known for its distortions of cellular morphology. No, it’s retroviral in action: check E6/E7 proteins section under Virology for the mechanism, and note that the HPV directly interacts with cellular genome. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_papillomavirus_infection That and toxins are the only way for infections to potentiate cancer, and viruses don’t do toxins, because they literally can’t, that involves nonexistent cellular machinery.
Now that we’ve gotten cancer bullshit out of the way, the rest seems pretty solid, so I think you maybe were a bit harsh here Johnny.
EDIT: forgot to provide HPV link
