bronchus

Early-onset breast, tracheal, bronchus and lung, stomach and colorectal cancers showed the highest mortality and burden in 2019.

Coughing out small droplets from the bronchus is fairly efficient way of transmission of airborne disease, and these droplets now contain 70 times as much active viral particles.

And an interesting asymmetry: > The left main bronchus is the most common site of pin impaction.

Numerous authors have attributed this finding to the Bernoulli phenomenon, which states that coughing, laughing, or speaking creates stronger negative pressure in the narrow left bronchus than in the wide right bronchus.

It grows faster in your bronchus/windpipe[0], and slower in your alveoli, so while the cytokine storm (immune response) side of the disease is still concerning, the risk of pneumonia is greatly reduced.

The difference in severity is reportedly because it replicates 70x faster in the bronchus but 10x slower in the lung tissue, leading to more bronchitis and upper respiratory involvement and less pneumonia.

This also explains the increased infectiousness to me, as your bronchus would emit comparatively larger viral loads with each breath than the alveoli if we still believe the droplet and not airborne theory.

Even at the time there were articles in Nature protesting this just like people do global warming today: >THE curious associations with lung cancer found in relation to smoking habits do not, in the minds of some of us, lend themselves easily to the simple conclusion that the products of combustion reaching the surface of the bronchus induce, though after a long interval, the development of a cancer.

Cigarette smoking causes cancer of the mouth and throat, esophagus, stomach, colon, rectum, liver, pancreas, voicebox (larynx), trachea, bronchus, kidney and renal pelvis, urinary bladder, and cervix, and causes acute myeloid leukemia.

"Researchers found that omicron multiplied about 70 times faster than delta did in tissue samples from the bronchus" This seems to be the crucial sentence.

From page 2 of the full report[0]: "For example, Malignant neoplasms of the trachea, bronchus and lung (lung cancer) and Motor vehicle accidents are not rankable causes of death (see “Procedures for ranking causes of death”), although they can be identified using the standard mortality tabulation lists.