The Covid-19 Thread: News, Preparation Tips, Etc

SpiritJunkie

Well-Known Member
People in Canada who do not qualify for a stimulus check are still applying, and getting it. One woman who is a pensioner applied, she also applied for her 2 disabled children (or grands kids?) who are not working and got 12K in one month (6k was retroactive). you have to be working previously, and laid off because of COVID-19. I don’t qualify because I was unemployed before all of this. One guy I know is still working and collecting his 2k per month. The gov agency doing the payout are aware of these scammers and they’re like “oh, well” we will decide what to do with them later... I hope they get a huge tax bill next year. Do I sound salty? Maybe I am lol. I’m too chicken to even go there. I also worked too hard to put my license in jeopardy. They say they won’t prosecute but who knows. They may change their minds...
FACTS! CRA - Canada Revenue Agency have deployed people from other depts to process these applications & the regular due diligence isn't being done. I suspect that next tax season a lot people will be in for a surprise. I don't qualify either, I'm working. Good luck to those that think they got away with something.
 

InchHighPrivateEye

Well-Known Member
Yeah, I’ve been looking at the demographic info in my state and the disparity between the races has been getting smaller since they reported that it’s mostly Black people that are impacted. I’m no scientist, but seems like many white folk stopped caring and decided they were ready to protest about 2 or 3 weeks ago when the disparity info was made public. And now the percentage of patients/decedents has gone from
70/30 to 58/40ish. The black percentage is still disproportionately high, but it soon won’t be if they keep protesting in large groups while we stay inside.
 

sunshinebeautiful

Well-Known Member
I am so saddened. :cry3:

This week, I found out that the family of my former high school teachers was stricken with COVID-19. In fact, everyone was sick with it, including 2 college age kids, and although most of them were able to fight it off, the husband passed away. :(

My coworker also shared an article with me about her family. Multiple family members infected with COVID-19 and 3 of her cousins have died so far. A mother, daughter, and son all dead within weeks. The husband is still in the ICU holding on.

As the weeks go by, this thing starts to hit closer and closer to home. All of these deaths were Black folks, by the way. :(
 

vevster

Well-Known Member
My cousin beat The Rona and is waaaaay too anxious to get back to work for my comfort. Dude is a conductor for NYC transit. The last place you would have caught me BC is in an NYC subway train...its also the last place you're gonna catch me AC!
I am curious to see if he will be reinfected. ...I mean he volunteering as tribute so....
At least they are disinfecting the trains now.
 

awhyley

Well-Known Member
^^^ And 2020 just keeps on coming.



(eta: Just reading the above. So many ladies losing loved ones and friends to this virus.
My condolences.)
 
Last edited:

Transformer

Well-Known Member
Does anyone know what this is??? Would you know if you had this?


https://www.cdc.gov/xmrv/index.html

XMRV is a newly identified human retrovirus that is similar to a group of mouse retroviruses (called murine leukemia viruses, or MLVs) scientists have known about for years. XMRV refers to xenotropic murine leukemia virus-related virus. It was first identified in 2006 in tissue samples from men with prostate cancer.

In a study published in the journal Science in October 2009, scientists reported a potential association of XMRV with chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS). In this study, XMRV was detected in approximately two-thirds of patients diagnosed with CFS. They also identified DNA of XMRV in the blood cells of some healthy persons and suggested a potential for XMRV transmission by transfusion or transplantation.

However, other recent studies, including a July 2010 research report from CDC scientists and colleagues at two other institutions, found no evidence of XMRV in CFS patients and in controls (see Updates).

More recently, investigators from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and Harvard Medical School published a report that presents evidence of MLVs in blood samples from CFS patients and healthy blood donors. The authors state that although they found a broader group of MLVs, rather than XMRV, their results support the 2009 report in Science. The FDA /NIH paper was published online August 23, 2010, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The reporting of different findings from different studies is not uncommon. Various factors may have contributed to the differences in these studies, including selection criteria for inclusion of CFS patients, clinical complexities of CFS, and possible variations in XMRV and MLV infection rates among populations in different regions. Moreover, XMRV is a recently discovered virus and much remains to be learned about this and MLV-like viruses. As additional studies are done, it is possible that new findings may emerge that differ from what has been previously reported.

The potential role of XMRV and MLVs in causing diseases such as prostate cancer and CFS remains unknown at this time. Additional research is needed to further evaluate a possible link of XMRV and MLVs with negative health outcomes, including prostate cancer and CFS. If it is determined that XMRV and MLVs may have a role in causing disease and illness, prevention recommendations can be made.
 

vevster

Well-Known Member
This was an email from my ND with the results so far from the curbside antibody testing... very interesting....

Our Findings
Since then, we have tested 163 people with approximately 100 results being reported, and have learned a lot along the way. Of the 100 people we tested, 5 tested positive for IgG antibodies, indicating a past exposure. Those that have tested positive for IgG antibodies have had either a history of travel in large airports, direct contact with someone with confirmed COVID-19, or are first responders. Four out of five reported a history of illness.

What has been surprising is, of the people tested that reported direct contact with others with confirmed COVID-19, many have not tested positive for IgG antibodies indicating a history of exposure. We believe this to be due to a delay in the presence of IgG antibodies developing after an infection. It has been reported that the median incubation period (time from exposure to symptoms), is 5 days, however, there have been reports it can be up to an astonishing 42 days! Then after a person develops symptoms (if they even do), many will not develop IgG antibodies for a few weeks. A multidisciplinary team of researchers analyzed several different tests and there were patients with confirmed COVID-19 infection that did not develop IgG antibodies until 20 days after symptoms. This makes us wonder if some of the people testing for antibodies just tested too soon. A repeat test is always an option.

Testing Specificity and Sensitivity
Testing for COVID-19 continues to evolve and many tests are flooding the market. While we said we hoped for a reliable rapid test to be available soon, we have not seen one that meets the standards we seek in testing so we will continue to use the serology-based test. More information on serology and testing is available at John Hopkin's website.

No test is perfect but the current antibody testing has a reported specificity of 96% and sensitivity of 94%, which is consistent with what we are seeing and we are pleased with. The downside is the turnaround time is now averaging 4 days, which really isn't too bad!


We know many of you are hoping to get "back to work". We are looking forward to welcoming our patients back in the office with proper safety precautions soon. Please let us know if there are any other ways we can be of support.


Be Well,

Dr. Ellen Lewis
Clinic Director
 
Last edited:

shahala

Well-Known Member
Really heart warming story of a young doctor’s recovery and the importance of seeking medical attention sooner rather than later.

A Young Doctor, Fighting for His Life

“I just went down on my knees,” his mother recalled later. “I just implored God for mercy.”


By Nicholas Kristof

Opinion Columnist

A 27-Year-Old Doctor’s Fight Against Coronavirus
Dr. Andres Maldonado was on the front lines treating patients. Then he got sick too.
Dr. Andres Maldonado normally bounded into the Emergency Department, fit and vigorous, but this time he had to be escorted in, pale and fighting for breath, with a patient bracelet on his right wrist. A nurse, seeing her colleague struggle, burst into tears.

Maldonado was 27, a third-year resident physician with no underlying medical conditions. When he came down with a fever on March 23, he called in sick. Soon he developed a tightness in his chest and tested positive for the coronavirus.

At first he resisted the idea of seeking treatment. He was by nature stoical; in youth soccer games, other boys had crumpled when injured, but Maldonado always got up and limped through his pain. Now as a doctor — a badass emergency doctor, he jokingly called himself — he was humiliated by the thought of becoming a patient.

But on March 31, so out of breath he could barely get to the bathroom, he called his older brother, Nestor, also an emergency physician, who remembers panic in Andres’s voice.

“It hurts to breathe,” Andres told his brother. “My body aches all over. I’ve been having really bad fevers, and I’m getting, like, dizzy.”

“Yo,” his brother ordered him, “get your butt to the E.R.”

Maldonado called his parents to say that he was going to the hospital. His dad, Jose Maldonado, was a refugee from the civil war in El Salvador who started life over as a dishwasher in New York. His mom, Cecilia Aguilar-Maldonado, came from Ecuador, and both were undocumented for a time — yet they sent both sons through medical school. The parents were the first of many to be devastated by their son’s sickness.

“I just went down on my knees,” his mother recalled later. “I just implored God for mercy.”

She told her husband, and he began crying as she had never seen him cry before: “He was asking God to please save Andres and take him instead.”

Maldonado called ahead to the Jacobi Medical Center, one of several hospitals in the Bronx where he worked, and doctors there were waiting for him and gave him a room in the Emergency Department. Kelly Cabrera, a nurse who often worked beside him, spotted him and was puzzled.

“What are you doing here?” she asked. Gasping for breath, he explained that he had Covid-19.

“I tried to stay home,” he told her, embarrassed that he was giving his colleagues more work.

I got kicked in the stomach,” Cabrera recounted. “He was one of our own.”

Cabrera and the other nurses, all of whom knew Maldonado well, took blood and gave him oxygen and Tylenol. Several scrawled a big message and placed it on the window facing him: “We Love You.”

Cabrera stepped out, weeping and also cursing. “I felt incredible anger,” she said — at America’s lack of preparation for the virus, at shortages of protective equipment, at official dithering that had left Maldonado and other medical workers at risk. At least 145 health care professionals have died of Covid-19 in the United States, according to an unofficial list kept by Medscape.

Doctors in the E.R. saw that Maldonado’s condition was deteriorating. A new wave of fever swept over him, and he curled into a ball. His heart rate shot up to 130, and he was taking 35 breaths a minute, more than twice his normal rate. He couldn’t finish a sentence without running out of air. The doctors decided to rush Maldonado into the intensive care unit and put him on high-flow oxygen.

Maldonado had been sharing his lab results and X-rays with his girlfriend, Dr. Katherine Auwarter, an ob-gyn resident in Greenville, S.C., and now he texted her that he was being admitted to the I.C.U. She called immediately.

“I’m being admitted,” he told her weakly, and his voice broke. “I’m so scared.”

“I’m going to buy a plane ticket right now,” she told him. And then, she said, they both broke down.

She knew that what terrified Maldonado most was intubation and attachment to a ventilator: He knew that a great majority of patients intubated for Covid-19 never recovered. Doctors hadn’t directly raised with Maldonado the possibility of intubation, but he could see his oxygen levels slide — and his doctors kept an intubation cart outside his room, just in case.

When a patient is transferred from the E.R. to another floor, an orderly and a nurse typically roll the stretcher there. In this case, the Emergency Department staff gathered to wish him well, and two attending physicians and a nurse together pushed Maldonado’s stretcher to the I.C.U.

Doctors tried to smile reassuringly — but it was a front.

“I was terrified,” recalled Dr. Michael P. Jones, the head of the resident program. Jones went back to his office, closed the door, lowered his head on his desk and cried.


In the I.C.U., Maldonado was placed on a high-flow nasal cannula to force oxygen into his lungs. These devices have a good record of helping Covid-19 patients but are in short supply, and not all American hospitals have them.

His doctors believed that his life was in danger partly because of his body’s own immune response, creating a cytokine storm attacking the vital organs. Doctors proposed using an experimental drug, tocilizumab, to suppress his immune response. This has sometimes been used successfully with coronavirus patients but can also cause serious side effects; feeling desperate, Maldonado agreed.

The next day he was breathing a bit better, and the fever was gone. Slowly over several days his lungs cleared. After six days, he was discharged. The residency program insisted that he take two weeks to recover, and he used the time to reflect on life and the practice of medicine.

When he was in the E.R. as a patient, he had wanted to go to the toilet but couldn’t walk that far, and he was mortified at the thought of using a bedpan and having a nurse wipe his bottom. So he held it in, learning empathy for patient concerns that is difficult to teach in medical school.

He now urges people to be careful and to stay home. “I hear your frustration,” he says of those protesting to restart the economy, “but what good is all the things you’re protesting for if you’re dead?”

Another lesson: Don’t be a stoic and delay seeking help when it’s necessary. “The key to all of that was the early initiation of the high-flow nasal cannula,” said Dr. Noe Romo. “Andres was at the point where if we had waited a little longer, I don’t think the high flow would have been as effective.”

I tagged along on Maldonado’s first day back on the job recently. This was at Jack D. Weiler Hospital, and 50 of his colleagues turned out for a surprise celebration. They cheered, clapped and shouted his name.

He beamed. “I feel even more than ever that this is what I should be doing, that this is my calling,” he told me. “Maybe I got sick for a reason.”

One of his patients was a Central American woman in her 30s with the coronavirus, fear radiating from her eyes. Maldonado spoke to her in Spanish, asking medical questions but also reassuring her and telling her about his own brush with the virus.

“You know, I was in the intensive care unit,” he told her, adding teasingly, “If I got better, you have to get better, too!”

“Thank you,” she said, “for telling me that.”
 
Last edited:

discodumpling

Well-Known Member
My DD is outside playing with the neighbors kids. They all have masks on and are trying to maintain social distance. It's both comical and a little sad. My daughter just threw a piece of candy at her friend so they don't touch hands. The littlest one is a hugger...I can see her holding back her little fat self.
The dudes across the street just brought out a grill...time to go inside.
 

Transformer

Well-Known Member
My DD is outside playing with the neighbors kids. They all have masks on and are trying to maintain social distance. It's both comical and a little sad. My daughter just threw a piece of candy at her friend so they don't touch hands. The littlest one is a hugger...I can see her holding back her little fat self.
The dudes across the street just brought out a grill...time to go inside.

wasn’t everyone suppose to grill on the front this weekend?
 

Chromia

Well-Known Member
My Kroger pick up today was bad. They called at 6:40am to remind me of my pick up but, instead of it being at 10am like the voice message said yesterday, it was between 9-10am. I was annoyed because the call woke me up but I got to the store with 5 or 10 minutes to spare. Then I waited close to an hour before they came out with my groceries and I ended up with no meat. We didn't order much but there should've been a large pack of pork chops and another pack of chicken thighs. Neither was in the order. My online total was $160 but my actual receipt total was just under $80. That's how much stuff was missing from my order.

I wonder if it could be a supply chain issue since processing plants are closing but I'm inclined to believe it's a store-level problem. I may try a different Kroger before ditching them altogether.
I feel your pain. I had a frustrating experience with my Walmart pickup today. They forgot something, I called them and told them what was missing, they told me to come back, I went back 20 min later and the associate put the wrong item in my trunk, she told me she put the right item in my trunk, I pointed out what the label said, she ended up telling me what I ordered was out of stock (why didn't she say that over the phone, and why did my email say that the item was in stock and ready), and after almost an hour in the parking lot and talking to 4 different people I left with nothing but the promise for a refund.
:mad:
I'll stay away from this Walmart (I had a minor issue at that location last month) and go back to the other Walmarts where I've had good service.
 

Layluh

Well-Known Member
What's fascinating to me is my ceo told us in a meeting that hospitals arent talking about what works in providing treatment because the hospitals in the area are competing institutions.

I wonder if That's why we get all this random advice from random professionals on Instagram and tiktok of all places. ie "weve found that lying on your belly then touching your toes helps alleviate covid symptoms" or this drug or that could possibly work.
 

starfish

Well-Known Member
My urgent care has Rona antibodies tests but their tests, through LabCorp and Quest, have a 3-15% false negative rate. That’s pretty high. Part of me wants to test but maybe I should wait for the FDA approved Roche test.

“Basel-based Roche, which also makes molecular tests to identify active COVID-19 infections, said its antibody test has a specificity rate exceeding 99.8% and sensitivity of 100%, meaning tests would show very few false positives and no false negatives.”

Thinking about doing both, getting tested now and if it comes up negative, testing again with Roche just to be sure.
 

Stormy

Well-Known Member
Just found out a former coworker passed away of Covid. It made the news that she and her sister died at home. Older black lady that looked out for me and helped me jump through the the loops and nuances of opening cooperative group NCI oncology trials for my program. She was always like hey baby! What chu need? Always so positive and bubbly... You know the type that you add a Miss to their name for the respect. This one hurts :cry:
I'm so sorry @Everything Zen how ya holding up?
 

Stormy

Well-Known Member
I am so saddened. :cry3:

This week, I found out that the family of my former high school teachers was stricken with COVID-19. In fact, everyone was sick with it, including 2 college age kids, and although most of them were able to fight it off, the husband passed away. :(

My coworker also shared an article with me about her family. Multiple family members infected with COVID-19 and 3 of her cousins have died so far. A mother, daughter, and son all dead within weeks. The husband is still in the ICU holding on.

As the weeks go by, this thing starts to hit closer and closer to home. All of these deaths were Black folks, by the way. :(
Oh my God! That's a lot
I hope you get through this.
 

Keen

Well-Known Member
My urgent care has Rona antibodies tests but their tests, through LabCorp and Quest, have a 3-15% false negative rate. That’s pretty high. Part of me wants to test but maybe I should wait for the FDA approved Roche test.

“Basel-based Roche, which also makes molecular tests to identify active COVID-19 infections, said its antibody test has a specificity rate exceeding 99.8% and sensitivity of 100%, meaning tests would show very few false positives and no false negatives.”

Thinking about doing both, getting tested now and if it comes up negative, testing again with Roche just to be sure.

My Boss took the antibody test. He paid $160. He was convinced he was exposed. He wasn't.
 
Top