Sorry to hear about your wife. As grandparent comment implies, it’s likely not just COVID that causes these autoimmune problems, but COVID is the thing that most people in recent times got that caused this, so it gets the most press. From my research I discovered that ME/CFS/Lupus and a lot of other autoimmune related illnesses have been documented in medicine for decades but until COVID the medical field largely considered these illnesses as mostly just a fringe medical phenomena for interested researchers that was blown off by modern medical practitioners because the science to understand it is incomplete. Now that enough people like myself and you on behalf of your wife are out talking about it, the hope is that science will eventually catch up and figure out why this kind of thing happens