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

nycutiepie

Well-Known Member
I agree with your point, but I feel that claims of vitamin toxicity are generally over stated. Selenium is an immune boosting mineral so I'm sure it was placed in the formula in a thought out amount.

I see both sides.
The one with Selenium has more reviews. People with asthma and bronchitis claim they get some relief relatively quickly after taking it. I think I’ll go with the plain old NAC because my multi probably has selenium.

I’m only planning on taking it if I get any Upper respiratory symptoms.
 

meka72

Well-Known Member
As many states across the country make moves to open back up, no community seems more unsupportive of the decision than black Americans — one of the groups disproportionately harmed by the coronavirus and the economic downturn that came with it.

Despite public health officials warning that reopening is likely to lead to a surge of new infections, most states are easing restrictions on businesses and social activities, allowing at least 100 million people to begin moving around freely again.

This is concerning for many black Americans, a group that in the most recent CNN poll revealed that a majority of black adults — 54 percent — knew someone who had been diagnosed with coronavirus. The number of white adults who knew someone diagnosed with coronavirus was less than 40 percent.

And, according to the latest Washington Post-Ipsos poll, nearly 3 in 4 — 74 percent — of adults surveyed think the United States should keep trying to slow the spread of the virus, even if that means keeping many businesses closed. The percentage of black Americans who feel the same is 9 in 10.

This isn’t surprising, considering how devastating the virus’s impact on black America has been.

A study by Amfar, the Foundation for Aids Research, recently showed that disproportionately black counties have been home to more than half — 52 percent — of the coronavirus cases and more than half — 58 percent — of the deaths from covid-19, the disease the virus causes. The authors released the study with the hope that it could shape the decision-making process involving reopening businesses.

“It’s clear that there’s a disproportionate impact of covid-19 diagnoses and deaths among African Americans,” Gregorio Millett, vice president of Amfar, told The Post’s Vanessa Williams. “All of my colleagues fear that with these policies to open up communities, that the brunt of the covid-19 epidemic is not going to be borne equally on all communities, that we will likely see greater covid-19 deaths as well as cases in African American communities.”

One argument in support of reopening businesses is that doing so might benefit black Americans — a group that has been deeply affected by the economic downturn. According to another recent Post-Ipsos poll, 16 percent of black Americans report being laid off or furloughed since the outbreak began in the United States. The number is 11 percent for white Americans.

And the most recent jobs numbers showed that the black unemployment rate is 16.7 percent — two points higher than the overall unemployment rate, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

But opening businesses in communities that do not have the health-care infrastructure to respond to an expected spike in cases — which is the case in many predominantly black neighborhoods — appears to cause great discomfort for some in a community that is arguably suffering most from the coronavirus.

Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has acknowledged the virus’s harmful impact on black communities, and at a Senate hearing Tuesday warned of a possible escalation of cases if states are opened too quickly.

“If some areas, cities, states or what have you, jump over those various checkpoints and prematurely open up without having the capability of being able to respond effectively and efficiently, my concern is that we will start to see little spikes that might turn into outbreaks,” he said. “I have been very clear in my message — to try, to the best extent possible, to go by the guidelines, which have been very well thought-out and very well delineated.”

Moving forward with reopening could potentially harm black Americans most. As states across the country attempt to return to normal under varying degrees of caution to help protect residents from contracting and dying from the coronavirus, black Americans will probably be watching the decision-making processes of their political leaders closely as they attempt to make the best decisions for themselves.

110 Comments

Eugene Scott

Eugene Scott writes about identity politics for The Fix. He was previously a breaking news reporter at CNN Politics.Follow

https://www.washingtonpost.com/poli...-about-states-reopening-than-black-americans/
 

meka72

Well-Known Member
By Joel Achenbach


May 13 at 7:13 PM ET


Ordinary speech can emit small respiratory droplets that linger in the air for at least eight minutes and potentially much longer, according to a study published Wednesday that could help explain why infections of the coronavirus so often cluster in nursing homes, households, conferences, cruise ships and other confined spaces with limited air circulation.


The report, from researchers at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases and the University of Pennsylvania, was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a peer-reviewed journal. It is based on an experiment that used laser light to study the number of small respiratory droplets emitted through human speech.


The answer: a lot.


“Highly sensitive laser light scattering observations have revealed that loud speech can emit thousands of oral fluid droplets per second,” the report states.

(Sergio Moraes/Reuters) 


Previous research has shown large outbreaks of coronavirus infections in a call center in South Korea where workers were in proximity and in a crowded restaurant in China, and such events have led some experts to suspect that the highly contagious virus can spread through small aerosol droplets. That remains the subject of research and debate, and for now, the consensus among infectious disease experts is the virus is typically spread through large respiratory droplets.


This new study did not involve the coronavirus or any other virus, but instead looked at how people generate respiratory droplets when they speak. The experiment did not look at large droplets but instead focused on small droplets that can linger in the air much longer. These droplets still could potentially contain enough virus particles to represent an infectious dose, the authors said.


Louder speech produces more droplets, they note. The paper estimates that one minute of “loud speaking” generates “at least 1,000 virion-containing droplet nuclei that remain airborne” for more than eight minutes.


“This direct visualization demonstrates how normal speech generates airborne droplets that can remain suspended for tens of minutes or longer and are eminently capable of transmitting disease in confined spaces,” the authors write.


A video showing the laser experiment was circulating early last month through social media even as public health officials were weighing whether to recommend that people wear facial coverings. At the time, the National Institutes of Health cautioned that the research was “very preliminary” and should not be relied upon as a basis for public health measures.


Soon thereafter, however, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended facial coverings in public places where social distancing could not easily be maintained.


“This study is the most accurate measure of the size, number and frequency of droplets that leave the mouth during a normal conversation and shower any listeners within range,” said Benjamin Neuman, a virologist at Texas A&M University-Texarkana who was not involved in the research.


“This study doesn’t directly test whether the virus can be transmitted by talking, but it builds a strong circumstantial case that droplets produced in a normal close conversation would be large enough and frequent enough to create a high risk of spreading SARS-CoV-2 or any other respiratory virus between people who are not wearing face masks,” Neuman said.


“Speech creates droplets that breathing alone does not. That much is clear,” said Andrew Noymer, a University of California at Irvine epidemiologist who also was not part of the new research. “Big mouths of the world, beware. You’re putting the rest of us at risk.”



Joel Achenbach covers science and politics for the National desk. He has been a staff writer for The Post since 1990.




Democracy Dies in Darkness

https://www.washingtonpost.com/heal...293ba2-9557-11ea-82b4-c8db161ff6e5_story.html
 

meka72

Well-Known Member
By
Ariana Eunjung Cha
May 13, 2020 at 5:09 p.m. EDT


Jose Pascual, a critical care doctor at the University of Pennsylvania Health System, recalled those first, mad days treating the sick when he had little to offer beyond hunches and Hail Marys. Each new day brought bizarre new complications of the coronavirus that defied textbook treatments.

“We were flying blind,” he said. “There is nothing more disturbing for me as a doctor.”

Now, for the first time since a wave of patients flooded their emergency rooms in March, Pascual and others on the front lines are expressing a feeling they say they haven’t felt in a long time — glimmers of hope. They say they have devised a toolbox, albeit a limited and imperfect one, of drugs and therapies many believe give today’s patients a better shot at survival than those who came only a few weeks before.

To be clear, these are not therapies proved to kill or stop the virus. They range from protocols to diagnose and treat dangerous, but sometimes invisible, breathing problems that can be an early warning of covid-19 in some people, to efforts to reduce the illness’s severity or length. At this stage, they are still experimental approaches by doctors desperate to find ways to help gravely ill people and throwing everything they can think of at the problem.

The menu of treatment options, tried singly and increasingly in combination, includes the blood plasma of covid-19 survivors, a rich source of antibodies that may help neutralize the virus; drugs to suppress the body’s own immune response, which some believe goes into hyperdrive as it tries to fight an invader; anticoagulants, which decrease the risk of deadly clots, and finally, antivirals, such as remdesivir, the Gilead Sciences drugthat recently won approval for emergency use from the Food and Drug Administration.

Randomized clinical trials are necessary to confirm early anecdotal data, with the results probably months away. But doctors say they believe they are seeing some positive results from these and other things they have learned through trial and error these past 10 weeks.

Sign up for our Coronavirus Updates newsletter to track the outbreak. All stories linked in the newsletter are free to access.

“Things changed almost completely, from knowing nothing at all and going on hearsay from Milan, Seoul and Wuhan — to saying, ‘Well, this is something we know we can do,'" Pascual said.

The World Health Organization also sounded a note of optimism on Tuesday, saying it sees “potentially positive data” in four or five coronavirus treatments and planned additional studies to be able to make recommendations. “We do have some treatments that seem to be in very early studies limiting the severity or the length of the illness,” spokeswoman Margaret Harris said.

While doctors are still a long way from having a full picture of the virus and its effects, “it is a different world today,” said David Reich, a cardiac anesthesiologist and president of Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City.

[Doctors keep discovering new ways the coronavirus attacks the body]

Doctors warn against reopening too soon | Voices from the Pandemic

As some states began to reopen in late April, New York doctors who saw a decline in coronavirus patients said lifting social distancing could reverse progress. (Joyce Koh/The Washington Post)
A stream of small discoveries
Medicine as a field evolves slowly. But during the pandemic, months have been compressed into days, decades into weeks. The knowledge accumulated during the past couple of months was due not to a single eureka moment but rather a steady stream of small discoveries.

Yogen Kanthi, an assistant professor of cardiology at the University of Michigan, said the medical community has “a much better idea of what are the major contributors to death and are moving into the next phase of trying some more targeted treatments.”

As doctors have begun thinking of covid-19 as an illness that causes both clotting and inflammation problems, he said, the research has pivoted in new directions.

“Is there one medication that is going to do all that? My gut tells me it’s more a combination of things,” he said.

Kanthi and his rheumatology colleagues who focus on immune issues are launching a study that will look at various combinations of anti-inflammatory drugs and blood thinners to find out whether they work better together, as well as their optimal timing, dosage and mix.

[Blood thinners show promise for boosting the survival chances of the sickest covid patients]

One medication that has shown promise is a heartburn drug that contains the active ingredient in Pepcid. A study of 1,536 patients found those who took it were more likely to survive, but researchers cautioned it could have been just a coincidence.

A study published last week in the Lancetfound a combination of three antiviral drugs — separately used to treat HIV, hepatitis C and multiple sclerosis — appeared to hasten recovery in some patients.

While the status of certain drugs has been elevated, numerous others — including those with toxic effects that could have been hurting patients — have been largely ruled out. This includes the use of hydroxychloroquine — the anti-malarial drug touted by President Trump and given to coronavirus patients at many medical centers, even by doctors skeptical of the evidence but who had nothing else to offer.


A thermal camera monitor shows the body temperatures of passengers waiting to board planes at Seoul's Gimpo International Airport April 29. (Ahn Young-Joon/AP)
‘Curveballs’
Warnings in February about covid-19 from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention described a “pneumonia-like” illness making its way around the world. The health agency highlighted three symptoms: fever, coughing and shortness of breath. These first communications, used as part of the criteria for testing and as the basis for hospital preparations, reflected what was known at the time but sent the whole medical response awry.

Pascual recalled that as the five Penn Medicine hospitals readied themselves for a surge, they focused on the lungs. Ventilators were lined up in neat rows. Extra staff was called in to train on emergency treatment of breathing complications.

But as the ICUs filled with covid-19 patients, surprised doctors began to see dysfunction in other organs: Kidneys. Liver. Intestines. Skin. Even the brain. Pascual called them “curveballs,” and there were a lot of them.

[‘Frostbite’ toes and other peculiar rashes may be signs of hidden coronavirus infection, especially in the young]

It was the same at medical centers in other parts of the United States.

In New York, Reich was doing rounds at the hospital just as its patient load was accelerating, and a critical care doctor grabbed him in the hallway talking about how strange it was the tubes in kidney machines were clogging. A few days later, he heard from a lung specialist who was seeing an unusual pattern of high carbon dioxide levels in patients, even after giving them large amounts of oxygen. Then, a neurosurgeon called in about unusual clots in patients in their 30s and 40s.

[Young and middle-aged people, barely sick with covid-19, are dying of strokes]

About 200 miles north at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Mandeep Mehra, medical director of the heart center, and his colleagues discussed what he called “an interesting dichotomy with this infection.”

The vast majority, an estimated 80 to 85 percent, of people appear to fight it off without hospitalization while 15 to 20 percent become very ill.

“The main question is who are these people and how can we predict them,” Mehra said. “Very clearly, a few facts began to emerge, which is this disease is not just a disease of the virus. Something else peculiar happens to the human body where it creates a dis-regulated response.”


Places are marked for social distancing at the entrance to a market for agricultural produce in Mumbai. (Rajanish Kakade/AP)
Improvisations
Some of the ways doctors may be saving more lives involve simple changes to protocols that have been blown up and reinvented to reflect the idiosyncrasies of a new disease.

One of the most important involves diagnosing dangerous but often hidden lung problems.

[‘Second-week crash’ is time of peril for some covid-19 patients]

Many doctors, nurses and EMTs have described being unsettled by patients showing up deathly sick yet without obvious signs of breathing trouble. Patients with “silent hypoxia” may have alarmingly low oxygen levels but show no shortness of breath. The problem results in pneumonia when the lungs are not getting enough oxygen but carbon dioxide is still being expelled. In the beginning, many of these patients were dismissed by primary care doctors as having mild cases — until their bodies became so starved of oxygen they lost consciousness and died. Now doctors are advising anyone suspected of having covid-19 to use oximeters that clip onto the fingers to assess the saturation of oxygen in their blood, and staff at some nursing homes are using them regularly to monitor their residents.

Physicians also have improvised new approaches to boost breathing support, including how ventilators are used.

One key finding is that a simple procedure of flipping patients on their sides or stomachs in a process known as “proning” — which relieves weight or pressure on the lungs — could return some people’s oxygen levels to normal. Doctors have said they believe this allowed a number of patients to avoid being put on ventilators. Once people are put on the breathing machines, complications can ensue, and it requires many more medications and staff to keep them alive.

Many hospitals also have overhauled the timing, concentration and flow of oxygen they use on patients, and some swear moving the timing of when they put patients on ventilators — whether earlier or later than they might have in the past — has made a difference.

Physicians also said they realized some patients were experiencing respiratory distress because their throats were inflamed and causing problems with ventilator tubes. This was easily fixed with steroids that reduce swelling.

A paper published by Mehra in the New England Journal of Medicine showed ACE inhibitors, a drug used by millions of Americans to control blood pressure but which was stopped on many hospitalized patients due to worries it could exacerbate their illness, appeared to be safe when used on those patients, at least.

Other discoveries have been grimmer.

A number of centers began to see dangerous heart rhythm readings in patients who were on hydroxychloroquine and who subsequently died. Many of these patients were critically ill with multiple organs affected, so the exact cause of death was unclear. But doctors were concerned enough that they backed off use of the drug weeks before a Veteran’s Administration study showed a higher risk of death, and the Food and Drug Administration warned against its use on Apr. 30.

Meanwhile, the results of tests of various drugs have come in quick succession: An HIV drug by AbbVie showed no improvement in a 199-patient clinical trial. An arthritis drug by Regeneron and Sanofi produced similarly disappointing results.

Some theorize early failures of some drugs that target a hyperactive inflammatory response may be because those drugs tend to suppress just one in a broad category of cytokines, or proteins important in cell signaling. “It was like playing whack a mole,” explained the University of Michigan’s Kanthi. “You block one cytokine and then another one pops up.”

One challenge to therapies for covid-19, Pascual said, is that the havoc caused by the virus seems to last a long time — in some patients two, three or even six weeks. Critically ill patients may need many different treatments in that period to stay alive — blood pressure medications for the heart, dialysis for their kidneys, ventilators for breathing. If they can be kept stable for that length of time until doctors can remove the support of machines, he said, more patients just might have a chance.

“The reassuring thing is this virus, like others, eventually burns out,” Pascual said. “In the end, it’s a waiting game.”

Read more:

Children are falling ill with perplexing inflammatory syndrome thought to be linked to covid-19

‘Frostbite’ toes and other peculiar rashes may be signs of hidden coronavirus infection, especially in the young

Young and middle-aged people, barely sick with covid-19, are dying of strokes

1.3k Comments

Ariana Eunjung Cha

Ariana Eunjung Cha is a national reporter. She has previously served as The Post's bureau chief in Shanghai and San Francisco, and as a correspondent in Baghdad.
 

dancinstallion

Well-Known Member
Not just that. I had to go to Manhattan today and there were soooo many cars. I’ve been expecting this.

I am in lower Manhattan. The streets are packed with cars there are no parking spots. My parking garage is now almost full and in April there was only about 7 cars. Many people are working. people are out daily walking and jogging everywhere. There is a lot of traffic too. It is still moving traffic with very few traffic jams.
 

vevster

Well-Known Member
I am in lower Manhattan. The streets are packed with cars there are no parking spots. My parking garage is now almost full and in April there was only about 7 cars. Many people are working. people are out daily walking and jogging everywhere. There is a lot of traffic too. It is still moving traffic with very few traffic jams.
Exactly.
 

vevster

Well-Known Member
No mention of antiviral minerals and vitamins. :drunk: I hope this works for whoever believes in American Medicine !

By
Ariana Eunjung Cha
May 13, 2020 at 5:09 p.m. EDT


Jose Pascual, a critical care doctor at the University of Pennsylvania Health System, recalled those first, mad days treating the sick when he had little to offer beyond hunches and Hail Marys. Each new day brought bizarre new complications of the coronavirus that defied textbook treatments.

“We were flying blind,” he said. “There is nothing more disturbing for me as a doctor.”

Now, for the first time since a wave of patients flooded their emergency rooms in March, Pascual and others on the front lines are expressing a feeling they say they haven’t felt in a long time — glimmers of hope. They say they have devised a toolbox, albeit a limited and imperfect one, of drugs and therapies many believe give today’s patients a better shot at survival than those who came only a few weeks before.

To be clear, these are not therapies proved to kill or stop the virus. They range from protocols to diagnose and treat dangerous, but sometimes invisible, breathing problems that can be an early warning of covid-19 in some people, to efforts to reduce the illness’s severity or length. At this stage, they are still experimental approaches by doctors desperate to find ways to help gravely ill people and throwing everything they can think of at the problem.

The menu of treatment options, tried singly and increasingly in combination, includes the blood plasma of covid-19 survivors, a rich source of antibodies that may help neutralize the virus; drugs to suppress the body’s own immune response, which some believe goes into hyperdrive as it tries to fight an invader; anticoagulants, which decrease the risk of deadly clots, and finally, antivirals, such as remdesivir, the Gilead Sciences drugthat recently won approval for emergency use from the Food and Drug Administration.

Randomized clinical trials are necessary to confirm early anecdotal data, with the results probably months away. But doctors say they believe they are seeing some positive results from these and other things they have learned through trial and error these past 10 weeks.

Sign up for our Coronavirus Updates newsletter to track the outbreak. All stories linked in the newsletter are free to access.

“Things changed almost completely, from knowing nothing at all and going on hearsay from Milan, Seoul and Wuhan — to saying, ‘Well, this is something we know we can do,'" Pascual said.

The World Health Organization also sounded a note of optimism on Tuesday, saying it sees “potentially positive data” in four or five coronavirus treatments and planned additional studies to be able to make recommendations. “We do have some treatments that seem to be in very early studies limiting the severity or the length of the illness,” spokeswoman Margaret Harris said.

While doctors are still a long way from having a full picture of the virus and its effects, “it is a different world today,” said David Reich, a cardiac anesthesiologist and president of Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City.

[Doctors keep discovering new ways the coronavirus attacks the body]

Doctors warn against reopening too soon | Voices from the Pandemic

As some states began to reopen in late April, New York doctors who saw a decline in coronavirus patients said lifting social distancing could reverse progress. (Joyce Koh/The Washington Post)
A stream of small discoveries
Medicine as a field evolves slowly. But during the pandemic, months have been compressed into days, decades into weeks. The knowledge accumulated during the past couple of months was due not to a single eureka moment but rather a steady stream of small discoveries.

Yogen Kanthi, an assistant professor of cardiology at the University of Michigan, said the medical community has “a much better idea of what are the major contributors to death and are moving into the next phase of trying some more targeted treatments.”

As doctors have begun thinking of covid-19 as an illness that causes both clotting and inflammation problems, he said, the research has pivoted in new directions.

“Is there one medication that is going to do all that? My gut tells me it’s more a combination of things,” he said.

Kanthi and his rheumatology colleagues who focus on immune issues are launching a study that will look at various combinations of anti-inflammatory drugs and blood thinners to find out whether they work better together, as well as their optimal timing, dosage and mix.

[Blood thinners show promise for boosting the survival chances of the sickest covid patients]

One medication that has shown promise is a heartburn drug that contains the active ingredient in Pepcid. A study of 1,536 patients found those who took it were more likely to survive, but researchers cautioned it could have been just a coincidence.

A study published last week in the Lancetfound a combination of three antiviral drugs — separately used to treat HIV, hepatitis C and multiple sclerosis — appeared to hasten recovery in some patients.

While the status of certain drugs has been elevated, numerous others — including those with toxic effects that could have been hurting patients — have been largely ruled out. This includes the use of hydroxychloroquine — the anti-malarial drug touted by President Trump and given to coronavirus patients at many medical centers, even by doctors skeptical of the evidence but who had nothing else to offer.


A thermal camera monitor shows the body temperatures of passengers waiting to board planes at Seoul's Gimpo International Airport April 29. (Ahn Young-Joon/AP)
‘Curveballs’
Warnings in February about covid-19 from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention described a “pneumonia-like” illness making its way around the world. The health agency highlighted three symptoms: fever, coughing and shortness of breath. These first communications, used as part of the criteria for testing and as the basis for hospital preparations, reflected what was known at the time but sent the whole medical response awry.

Pascual recalled that as the five Penn Medicine hospitals readied themselves for a surge, they focused on the lungs. Ventilators were lined up in neat rows. Extra staff was called in to train on emergency treatment of breathing complications.

But as the ICUs filled with covid-19 patients, surprised doctors began to see dysfunction in other organs: Kidneys. Liver. Intestines. Skin. Even the brain. Pascual called them “curveballs,” and there were a lot of them.

[‘Frostbite’ toes and other peculiar rashes may be signs of hidden coronavirus infection, especially in the young]

It was the same at medical centers in other parts of the United States.

In New York, Reich was doing rounds at the hospital just as its patient load was accelerating, and a critical care doctor grabbed him in the hallway talking about how strange it was the tubes in kidney machines were clogging. A few days later, he heard from a lung specialist who was seeing an unusual pattern of high carbon dioxide levels in patients, even after giving them large amounts of oxygen. Then, a neurosurgeon called in about unusual clots in patients in their 30s and 40s.

[Young and middle-aged people, barely sick with covid-19, are dying of strokes]

About 200 miles north at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Mandeep Mehra, medical director of the heart center, and his colleagues discussed what he called “an interesting dichotomy with this infection.”

The vast majority, an estimated 80 to 85 percent, of people appear to fight it off without hospitalization while 15 to 20 percent become very ill.

“The main question is who are these people and how can we predict them,” Mehra said. “Very clearly, a few facts began to emerge, which is this disease is not just a disease of the virus. Something else peculiar happens to the human body where it creates a dis-regulated response.”


Places are marked for social distancing at the entrance to a market for agricultural produce in Mumbai. (Rajanish Kakade/AP)
Improvisations
Some of the ways doctors may be saving more lives involve simple changes to protocols that have been blown up and reinvented to reflect the idiosyncrasies of a new disease.

One of the most important involves diagnosing dangerous but often hidden lung problems.

[‘Second-week crash’ is time of peril for some covid-19 patients]

Many doctors, nurses and EMTs have described being unsettled by patients showing up deathly sick yet without obvious signs of breathing trouble. Patients with “silent hypoxia” may have alarmingly low oxygen levels but show no shortness of breath. The problem results in pneumonia when the lungs are not getting enough oxygen but carbon dioxide is still being expelled. In the beginning, many of these patients were dismissed by primary care doctors as having mild cases — until their bodies became so starved of oxygen they lost consciousness and died. Now doctors are advising anyone suspected of having covid-19 to use oximeters that clip onto the fingers to assess the saturation of oxygen in their blood, and staff at some nursing homes are using them regularly to monitor their residents.

Physicians also have improvised new approaches to boost breathing support, including how ventilators are used.

One key finding is that a simple procedure of flipping patients on their sides or stomachs in a process known as “proning” — which relieves weight or pressure on the lungs — could return some people’s oxygen levels to normal. Doctors have said they believe this allowed a number of patients to avoid being put on ventilators. Once people are put on the breathing machines, complications can ensue, and it requires many more medications and staff to keep them alive.

Many hospitals also have overhauled the timing, concentration and flow of oxygen they use on patients, and some swear moving the timing of when they put patients on ventilators — whether earlier or later than they might have in the past — has made a difference.

Physicians also said they realized some patients were experiencing respiratory distress because their throats were inflamed and causing problems with ventilator tubes. This was easily fixed with steroids that reduce swelling.

A paper published by Mehra in the New England Journal of Medicine showed ACE inhibitors, a drug used by millions of Americans to control blood pressure but which was stopped on many hospitalized patients due to worries it could exacerbate their illness, appeared to be safe when used on those patients, at least.

Other discoveries have been grimmer.

A number of centers began to see dangerous heart rhythm readings in patients who were on hydroxychloroquine and who subsequently died. Many of these patients were critically ill with multiple organs affected, so the exact cause of death was unclear. But doctors were concerned enough that they backed off use of the drug weeks before a Veteran’s Administration study showed a higher risk of death, and the Food and Drug Administration warned against its use on Apr. 30.

Meanwhile, the results of tests of various drugs have come in quick succession: An HIV drug by AbbVie showed no improvement in a 199-patient clinical trial. An arthritis drug by Regeneron and Sanofi produced similarly disappointing results.

Some theorize early failures of some drugs that target a hyperactive inflammatory response may be because those drugs tend to suppress just one in a broad category of cytokines, or proteins important in cell signaling. “It was like playing whack a mole,” explained the University of Michigan’s Kanthi. “You block one cytokine and then another one pops up.”

One challenge to therapies for covid-19, Pascual said, is that the havoc caused by the virus seems to last a long time — in some patients two, three or even six weeks. Critically ill patients may need many different treatments in that period to stay alive — blood pressure medications for the heart, dialysis for their kidneys, ventilators for breathing. If they can be kept stable for that length of time until doctors can remove the support of machines, he said, more patients just might have a chance.

“The reassuring thing is this virus, like others, eventually burns out,” Pascual said. “In the end, it’s a waiting game.”

Read more:

Children are falling ill with perplexing inflammatory syndrome thought to be linked to covid-19

‘Frostbite’ toes and other peculiar rashes may be signs of hidden coronavirus infection, especially in the young

Young and middle-aged people, barely sick with covid-19, are dying of strokes

1.3k Comments

Ariana Eunjung Cha

Ariana Eunjung Cha is a national reporter. She has previously served as The Post's bureau chief in Shanghai and San Francisco, and as a correspondent in Baghdad.
 

shahala

Well-Known Member
Virologist Dr. Joseph Fair, believes he contracted COVID -19 through his eyes.
So I guess to be totally safe, we should be wearing shields and masks like the professionals?



Joining TODAY live from his hospital room, virologist Dr. Joseph Fair, an NBC News contributor, talks about how he contracted COVID-19 himself despite many precautions. He suspects that he may have gotten the virus through his eyes on a plane flight. “It felt like a moderately severe flu for the first week,” he says, but then his condition got progressively worse and he had trouble breathing. He declined to be intubated and responded well to oxygen and drug treatment, and has been taken off the critical list. “I am a very healthy person,” he says. “If it can take me down, it can take anybody down.”



https://www.today.com/video/dr-jose...-take-me-down-it-can-take-anybody-83450437646
 

SoniT

Well-Known Member
My state is starting phase 1 of reopening tomorrow but my county is continuing the stay at home order until June 1. Smart move because we have the highest number of cases in the state. I wish the entire state was on one accord though. Oh well, my household is still taking the proper precautions and protecting ourselves.
 

Kanky

Well-Known Member
My state is starting phase 1 of reopening tomorrow but my county is continuing the stay at home order until June 1. Smart move because we have the highest number of cases in the state. I wish the entire state was on one accord though. Oh well, my household is still taking the proper precautions and protecting ourselves.

Won't this just lead to people in your county traveling to other parts of the state and spreading the illness?
Ladies,
I'm having a hard time finding disinfecting spray ie. Lysol Clorox or any off brand for that matter. Please share your online sources for this and other hard to find items here. I'm almost out of spray!

If you are quick online then you can get sprays and wipes delivered from Amazon, Costco or Sam’s Club. You have to check frequently. I’ve had the best luck at about 2am.
 

vevster

Well-Known Member
Ladies,
I'm having a hard time finding disinfecting spray ie. Lysol Clorox or any off brand for that matter. Please share your online sources for this and other hard to find items here. I'm almost out of spray!
Do you have bleach? You can make a disinfecting spray with bleach and water. For my other disinfectants, where I ordered from are all backordered.
 

Reinventing21

Spreading my wings
I hate how all this is framed: "This primarily negatively affects Blacks so oh well...the rest are safe".

The reality is that all poor communities are at high risk due to poor living conditions including housing with only a foot between houses, lack of quality health care, lack of knowledge, poorer schools with horrible vent situations.

There was a story about an infected man in the UK who spat on a Black woman. She died of covid as a result.

People should care that the poor are getting the disease as well. This could easily turn into a race bio weapon war that goes both ways.

ETA: When I say 'poor communities' I mean all poorer 'minority' communities regardless of race around the world.
 
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