At this point it seems like basically everything and anything is being attributed to this virus, often without any kind of study or robust evidence.

Occam's Razor can help here. We know that there are treatments for these ailments that can help people. We know these treatments stopped due to lockdown and people being afraid to go to hospitals. We know this must, but implication, increase deaths from these ailments.

The alternative explanation is far more complex, actually it's of unbounded complexity because as far as I know there isn't any clear known mechanism of action that shows how this type of virus can cause all these different kinds of problems. Is there even a robust set of studies that show how this type of virus causes blood clots? As far as I know there is some evidence that blood thinners can help a bit with flu, sometimes, so it's not entirely implausible, but I think it's also unknown what exactly happens there and why. And people keep saying this virus is totally unlike flu so that similarity should maybe be discarded.

The mechanism of action behind the broad symptoms we see is actually reasonably straightforward- the ace2 receptor the virus uses to enter cells is everywhere in your body. In vitro, they replicate in pancreatic cells and intestinal cells, which lends a mechanistic explanation for the link to gastrointestinal distress and diabetes seen in correlative findings. Heart muscle also has high concentrations of the ACE2 receptor. One of the mechanistic hypothesis for clotting [0] proposed is that the complement system and immune cascades trigger clots, since they saw evidence of the virus binding to an element in the complement cascade. This could turn out to be entirely wrong of course, but that's a hint at the other key aspect of this that allows varied results - your immune system can react poorly and is capable of screwing up in fascinating and varied ways. It could be the virus killing pancreatic cells, or an autoimmune response triggered by the virus that causes pancreatic cell death since the virus infects them and marks them for destruction.

Are these the driving forces behind increased clots etc? Maybe not. Maybe its contributing equally with people staying at home, or maybe not at all. But the mechanistic reasons for the broad symptoms are there and they're relatively straightforward, driven by the ability of the virus to infect lots of different cells and the variability of the human immune system

[0]https://news.weill.cornell.edu/news/2020/07/what-is-known-ab...