Coronavirus Updates

[Innula Zenovka]

Surprise, the drug promoted by T-Rump and "Doctor" Oz is completely ineffective, if not downright dangerous.

Hydroxychloroquine as treatment for COVID-19 shows no benefit and more deaths in VA study

President Trump has frequently touted the malaria drug as a potential breakthrough in the ongoing coronavirus fight.

www.marketwatch.com

As it happens, I received a text the other day from the NHS medical practice where I'm registered (that is, my family doctor) telling me that they're participating in a large-scale clinical trial of hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for COVID-19, as part of a rolling national programme to evaluate different treatments as and when they become available:

National priority COVID-19 trial recruits first patients — PRINCIPLE Trial

Researchers from Oxford University are now enrolling participants into PRINCIPLE, the first clinical trial of potential COVID-19 treatments to take place in GP practices.

www.phctrials.ox.ac.uk

About PRINCIPLE and how to join — PRINCIPLE Trial

PRINCIPLE is a nationwide clinical trial platform from the University of Oxford aiming to find treatments for COVID-19 for older people in the community.

www.phctrials.ox.ac.uk

So I think it may be premature to say it's "completely ineffective, if not downright dangerous" since the trials are presumably intended to determine all that.

 

[Innula Zenovka]

I am not about to give them traffic if it is false. I am already trying to convince someone in our building not to use our tennant list to promote magic cures that are described as pseudoscience. What is the url to the study they base the statement on?

If you reread the NYT article to which Beebo linked you will notice that it's by a physician providing emergency care to Covid-19 patients in NY. He writes

patients did not report any sensation of breathing problems, even though their chest X-rays showed diffuse pneumonia and their oxygen was below normal. How could this be?

We are just beginning to recognize that Covid pneumonia initially causes a form of oxygen deprivation we call “silent hypoxia” — “silent” because of its insidious, hard-to-detect nature.

Pneumonia is an infection of the lungs in which the air sacs fill with fluid or pus. Normally, patients develop chest discomfort, pain with breathing and other breathing problems. But when Covid pneumonia first strikes, patients don’t feel short of breath, even as their oxygen levels fall. And by the time they do, they have alarmingly low oxygen levels and moderate-to-severe pneumonia (as seen on chest X-rays). Normal oxygen saturation for most persons at sea level is 94 percent to 100 percent; Covid pneumonia patients I saw had oxygen saturations as low as 50 percent.

To my amazement, most patients I saw said they had been sick for a week or so with fever, cough, upset stomach and fatigue, but they only became short of breath the day they came to the hospital. Their pneumonia had clearly been going on for days, but by the time they felt they had to go to the hospital, they were often already in critical condition.

He goes on to suggest that if people use a pulse oximeter to monitor their blood oxygen levels, that will enable them to see that something's wrong, even though they may not be experiencing any difficulties breathing of which they're aware, and thus they'll be able to seek medical advice for this before their lungs have sustained too much damage.

So I don't see where you're getting " miracle cure" from, I'm afraid -- the article recommends a diagnostic tool that may provide advance warning and help patients seek early treatment, that's all.

(I've just ordered one, too, on the basis that it's difficult to go far wrong following either Beebo's or Eku's advice).

 

[Innula Zenovka]

French researchers to test nicotine patches on coronavirus patients

Study – which stresses serious health risks of smoking – suggest substance in tobacco may lower risk of getting coronavirus

www.theguardian.com

French researchers are planning to test nicotine patches on coronavirus patients and frontline health workers after a study suggested smokers may be much less at risk of contracting the virus.

The study at a major Paris hospital suggests a substance in tobacco – possibly nicotine – may be stopping patients who smoke from catching Covid-19. Clinical trials of nicotine patches are awaiting the approval of the country’s health authorities.

However, the researchers insisted they were not encouraging the population to take up smoking, which carries other potentially fatal health risks and kills 50% of those who take it up. While nicotine may protect those from the virus, smokers who have caught it often develop more serious symptoms because of the toxic effect of tobacco smoke on the lungs, they say.

 

[Fionalein]

French researchers to test nicotine patches on coronavirus patients

Study – which stresses serious health risks of smoking – suggest substance in tobacco may lower risk of getting coronavirus

www.theguardian.com

Why do they guess it could be the nicotine? Those smokers most likely have scarred lung tissues, which might be a much more reasonable explanation ...

 

[Free]

Could also be any one of the chemical additives found in cigarettes these days.

 

[Fionalein]

Could also be any one of the chemical additives found in cigarettes these days.

I consider reworking a vaping valve into a room incense evaporator now...

 

[Innula Zenovka]

Why do they guess it could be the nicotine? Those smokers most likely have scarred lung tissues, which might be a much more reasonable explanation ...

The research paper is available here:

A nicotinic hypothesis for Covid-19 with preventive and therapeutic implications

SARS-CoV-2 epidemics raises a considerable issue of public health at the planetary scale. There is a pressing urgency to find treatments based upon currently available scientific knowledge. Therefore, we tentatively propose a hypothesis which hopeful...

www.qeios.com

That gives the reasons for their hypothesis, based on the data.

I'm completely unqualified to assess either their discussion or conclusions, but you may find it more comprehensible than do I.

 

[Free]

The research paper is available here:

A nicotinic hypothesis for Covid-19 with preventive and therapeutic implications

SARS-CoV-2 epidemics raises a considerable issue of public health at the planetary scale. There is a pressing urgency to find treatments based upon currently available scientific knowledge. Therefore, we tentatively propose a hypothesis which hopeful...

www.qeios.com

Already updated:

A nicotinic hypothesis for Covid-19 with preventive and therapeutic implications - Article (Preprint v2) | Qeios

 

[Free]

Ach...

Americans are poisoning themselves while trying to kill the coronavirus

As the pandemic picked up in the US, so did poison reports.

arstechnica.com

 

[Aribeth Zelin]

Funny thing - I saw that article about not detecting the problems with breathing until too late, and I was thinking how every time I go for any medical stuff its one of the first things they check...

And think I want an oximonitor, now I know its a thing I can actually get.

-------------

Also, I'm confused - is smoking bad for me, or good for me

 

[Casey Pelous]

... Also, I'm confused - is smoking bad for me, or good for me

Smoking way bad. Nicotine --- a little bit good? Maybe?

The hypothesis will be easy enough to check out (presuming someone has the time) by checking infection rates in populations that use nicotine gum/patches/etc.

Unfortunately, that population is about to run out of said gum/etc. because now there will be a run on THAT stuff.

 

[Beebo Brink]

I am not about to give them traffic if it is false. I am already trying to convince someone in our building not to use our tennant list to promote magic cures that are described as pseudoscience. What is the url to the study they base the statement on?

Read. the. article.

This is not a treatment, it's a diagnostic tool. Given the state of my lungs, I should have ordered one of these years ago. The other treatments this doctor discusses have already been widely discussed as part of what was learned in Italy, such as putting patients face down instead of on their backs.

 

[Rose Karuna]

Well, I dunt give a flying fk what Dump and Oz say, or some study in Brazil either.
My brother is a rheumatologist who's been seeing patients on Plaquenil for years, and none of them have had heart attacks or died from it.
There have been and still are studies ongoing with varying results, but of course they're going to give the most coverage to the ones they can be dramatic about.
I will continue to listen to my brother, and if I get the damn virus and get very sick I will not hesitate to take it if I get the chance if it can keep me alive and off a ventilator.

As a lupus patient who was on Plaquenil for about six months I can tell you that it does have side effects, arrhythmia and heart murmur are only one of them. The side effect that I had that caused me to quit taking it, was extremely high pressure in my eyes. It can cause blindness. Plaquenil Side Effects on Your Eyes and Vision

People on Plaquenil have to be monitored. Since I was given the Plaquenil to essentially suppress my immune system, my guess is that it only helps in cases where the COVID-19 patient has a cytokine storm, in other cases, where the patient needs to fight the virus, it would work against them. There are no really good immune suppression drugs, they all have nasty side effects.

 

[Ryanna Enfield]

Community transmissions happened a lot sooner than originally thought.

Coronavirus Pandemic: First U.S. Coronavirus Deaths Traced Back To Santa Clara County

This is not surprising as I suspect my family had a case of community transmission starting around March 7th. We may never know, because on the 15th in urgent care we were advised we could not be tested because we had no travel history, or contact with a known confirmed positive case. My 2 and a half year-old never had any symptoms, despite having close contact with myself and my husband, who had symptoms.

 

[Beebo Brink]

A mysterious blood-clotting complication is killing coronavirus patients
Once thought a relatively straightforward respiratory virus, covid-19 is proving to be much more frightening

Then came the autopsies. When they opened up some deceased patients’ lungs, they expected to find evidence of pneumonia and damage to the tiny air sacs that exchange oxygen and carbon dioxide between the lungs and the bloodstream. Instead, they found tiny clots all over. ....Although there was no consensus on the biology of why this was happening and what could be done about it, many came to believe the clots might be responsible for a significant share of U.S. deaths from covid-19 — possibly explaining why so many people are dying at home.

 

[Kara Spengler]

If you reread the NYT article to which Beebo linked you will notice that it's by a physician providing emergency care to Covid-19 patients in NY. He writes



He goes on to suggest that if people use a pulse oximeter to monitor their blood oxygen levels, that will enable them to see that something's wrong, even though they may not be experiencing any difficulties breathing of which they're aware, and thus they'll be able to seek medical advice for this before their lungs have sustained too much damage.

So I don't see where you're getting " miracle cure" from, I'm afraid -- the article recommends a diagnostic tool that may provide advance warning and help patients seek early treatment, that's all.

(I've just ordered one, too, on the basis that it's difficult to go far wrong following either Beebo's or Eku's advice).

Generally we are doing mob logic. If anything sells our fast for no good reason odds are it will be a rumour about its medical properties, whether a cure or something else.

 

[Kara Spengler]

I consider reworking a vaping valve into a room incense evaporator now...

Meanwhile other articles are still dissing vaping. Forgot the url but replied that there are all sorts of categories (smoking cessation, vaping a non nicotine juice that was tested for the purpose, etc) and without a citation for each one said concluding 'all vaping is bad' was just scare tactics.

 

[Kara Spengler]

Read. the. article.

This is not a treatment, it's a diagnostic tool. Given the state of my lungs, I should have ordered one of these years ago. The other treatments this doctor discusses have already been widely discussed as part of what was learned in Italy, such as putting patients face down instead of on their backs.

I never said it was a treatment, I said I was dealing with someone who claimed something else was.

 

[Innula Zenovka]

Generally we are doing mob logic. If anything sells our fast for no good reason odds are it will be a rumour about its medical properties, whether a cure or something else.

As I understand it, because of my age and various health issues, if I fall ill from Covid-19, there's about a 30% chance I will require hospitalisation, and then quite a high probability I'll need to be admitted to an ICU. At that point, the danger of death becomes very real indeed.

That being the case, if I do fall ill and fail to recover within 7 days, I want to have as much information as possible to give when I call the the NHS Covid-19 number because I want to be admitted to hospital as soon as possible in order to improve the odds on my coming out again, and if my blood oxygen level is low, even though I'm not conscious of any breathing difficulties, that's something it could be important for the NHS 111 nurses to know when I phone.

No one is claiming a pulse oximeter has medicinal properties, any more than they're claiming thermometers and blood-pressure monitors can cure you of anything. Doesn't mean it's not a good idea to have one to use if necessary.

ETA: Makes good points:

It’s Honestly Fine if You Can’t Find a Pulse Oximeter to Buy

That viral New York Times op-ed makes some good points. But the timelines here are way off.

slate.com

 

[Clara D.]

With my various respiratory issues I should probably get one.

Tho most of them are cause by the incessant dripping from my fucked up and easily infected sinuses that the surgery got delayed for.