Looking for something else to blame when you agree that it's "highly unlikely but not impossible" simply shows how unintuitive statistics are.
How many people are known to have COVID in the US? 55,000 officially, probably 3-10x that, let's say 100k for a nice round number.
Is 1 out of 100k a "highly unlikely but not impossible" chance? Sure. So you don't need to assume that there must be other causes in the absence of other evidence.
The body is a large and extremely marvelous yet complex piece of machinery, even with self-repairing mechanisms.
Everyone is at risk even if they're healthy, it's just that the risk rates vary and for some groups are incredibly low based on the data. Knowing your risk rate is nearly impossible, but you can try to estimate based on how it effects larger subgroups of the population. That doesn't mean you're not at risk, it just means you're less likely at risk or were not measuring a risk factor you happen to be highly susceptible to.
Even run of the mill drugs have rare reactions that can lead to death. Across a large enough population and enough time, those rare reactions will occur. New unknown and unpredicted issues may even manifest.
People like to think in absolutes: I will die from this or I'm immune to this. Most of life isnt discrete (at least at our scale) and falls in some continuum between extremes.
I'd argue that this is a single datapoint out of nearly 20k deaths. Are the odds of dying young with zero pre-existing conditions on the order of 1:20k, or exactly zero? Is death from covid rare or impossible?
Most of what I've seen so far seems to suggest it works more like AIDs, where it weakens something (in this case, epithelial cells in the lungs) which allows other opportunistic issues to arise (bacterial pneumonia for example). So rather than dying "from the virus", you die from another underlying issue. Similar to how AIDs doesn't kill you, it just makes it easier for everything else to kill you
We have a choice here: strongly hold onto generalizations derived from early analysis, or keep an open mind about new developments in the rapidly growing data. By all means folks should scrutinize these developments as they arrived, but we should keep Dunning-Kreuger in mind: there's a whole lot we don't know about this virus.
Or it's correct and this person was one of the unlucky ones. The more total people are infected, the more statistically improbable deaths we're going to see.
Or, what we've all heard is correct, and that's why the first story of this type has only hit the news several months and over a hundred thousand confirmed cases into the pandemic.
