I don't know if anyone following me is a medical researcher working on COVID, or knows someone in that category, but just in case, I had a crazy thought I wanted to throw out there to see if anyone had looked into it yet. Standard disclaimer: I'm a space roboticist not a doctor.

Some of the papers I've seen mentioned recently were suggesting the hypothesis that part of how COVID works is by attacking the hemoglobin in red blood cells. Basically replacing some or all of it with virus proteins in a way that kicks out the Fe+ ions.

This, in theory, makes it so the red blood cells can't transport O2 or CO2 as well as they used to, which is hypothetically part of why people are having a hard time breathing -- it's not just the lungs getting clogged, its the blood not being as good at getting O2 from the lungs

Supposedly this is also showing up as increased levels of some iron-bearing compound in the blood that the body uses to store iron when it has too much of it. My guess is this can't be very helpful to the liver or kidneys, but I digress.

So, I have no idea how accepted the above hypothesis is, or if I've butchered it beyond recognition. But if it is true, I wonder if depleting infected red blood cells of Fe might change the magnetic properties of those cells in a way that might enable filtering out infected ones.

I did some googling, and it looks like there has been work on using the paramagnetic properties of red blood cells to magnetically separate them. I wonder if you could use that to separate healthy from infected red blood cells. And whether that does anything useful for you.

Could you for instance have a machine that's helping scrub infected blood cells from the body? Would the body then react by producing more new red blood cells, and then reabsorbing all of those iron-bearing compounds that are still floating around?

Or could you filter out the damaged red blood cells, and replace them with a transfusion of healthy ones from someone else (decreasing the amount of blood you need by only replacing the damaged cells)?

For recovered people, does the body naturally attack and destroy the hemoglobin-depleted red blood cells, or are these hanging around keeping it so its hard for the person to breathe even when their lungs recover? Would scrubbing out the bad blood cells help them recover faster?

I can imagine about a bajillion reasons why this could be wrong (starting with the fact that I have no idea if the hemoglobin attack hypothesis is true or not), but I wanted to throw it out there just in case this was a useful thought that wasn't being researched yet.

Our space robotics startup uses a lot of high-power electropermanent magnet technology (no moving-parts, only uses power to gauss or degauss a permanent magnet, which then retains state indefinitely), so I've started looking at a lot of problems as magnetics problems.

Anyhow, I'd love to get feedback from someone medically qualified on if this idea has any merit, or if I'm completely off my rocker. And if there's any way we can help, we'd like to be part of the solution. It's been frustrating feeling worthless in a situation like this.