Covid-19 News

    Associated to Zn deficiency?


    https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/lio2.513


    I have seen crazy low Zn blood levels in COVID-19 patients, especially those with anosmia. I would not be surprised if there is a causal relationship between the two.

    Fully vaccinated people can skip Covid quarantines, CDC says


    https://news.google.com/articl…=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US%3Aen


    (CNN)People who have been fully vaccinated against coronavirus -- right now that means with two doses of either the Pfizer/BioNTech or Moderna vaccine -- can skip quarantine if they are exposed to someone infected with the virus, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Wednesday.


    That doesn't mean they should stop taking precautions, the CDC noted in updated guidance. It's just not necessary for them to quarantine.


    "Fully vaccinated persons who meet criteria will no longer be required to quarantine following an exposure to someone with COVID-19," the CDC said in updates to its web page with guidance on vaccination.

    Coronavirus may infect key brain cells, causing neurons to die


    https://news.google.com/articl…=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US%3Aen


    In the brains of COVID-19 patients

    The new study pulled data from three sources: cells in lab dishes, brain tissue from deceased patients and brain scans from living patients who had recovered from mild COVID-19 infections.


    Given the stark differences between each arm of the study, "I think it is difficult to compare the mild disease portion of the study to the severe disease cohort," said Dr. Maria Nagel, a professor of neurology and ophthalmology at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, who was not involved in the study. In other words, brain changes seen in mild infection may not be driven by the same mechanisms as those seen in tissue from people who died of COVID-19, she told Live Science in an email.


    To assess the 81 patients with mild infections, the team took magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans of their brains and compared these with scans from 145 volunteers with no history of COVID-19. They found that certain regions of the cerebral cortex — the wrinkled surface of the brain responsible for complex processes like memory and perception — showed significant differences in thickness between the two groups.


    "It was surprising," said study author Dr. Clarissa Lin Yasuda, an assistant professor in the Department of Neurosurgery and Neurology at the University of Campinas.


    The MRI scans were taken roughly two months after each COVID-19 patients' diagnosis, but "in two months, I wouldn't expect such changes," assuming the patients' brains once looked more like the uninfected participants', Yasuda said. Usually, only long-term, persistent insults cause cortex thickness changes, she added. Chronic stress, drug abuse and infections such as HIV have been associated with changes in cortical thickness, for example, Nagel said.


    Related: 11 (sometimes) deadly diseases that hopped across species


    In the COVID-19 patients, regions of the cortex located just above the nose showed significant thinning, hinting that the nose and related sensory nerves might be an important route for the virus into the brain, Yasuda said. That said, the virus likely doesn't invade everyone's brain; but even in those who avoid direct brain infection, immune responses like inflammation may sometimes damage the brain and thin out the cortex, Yasuda said. This particular study cannot show whether direct infection or inflammation drove the differences; it only shows a correlation between COVID-19 and cortex thickness, Nagel noted.


    To better understand how often and how extensively SARS-CoV-2 invades the brain, the team collected brain samples from 26 patients who had died of COVID-19, finding brain damage in five of the 26.


    The damage included patches of dead brain tissue and markers of inflammation. Notably, the team also detected SARS-CoV-2 genetic material and the viral "spike protein," which sticks off the virus's surface, in all five of the patients' brains. These findings indicate that their brain cells were directly infected by the virus.


    The majority of the cells infected were astrocytes, followed by neurons. This hinted that, once SARS-CoV-2 reaches the brain, astrocytes may be more susceptible to infection than neurons, Martins-de-Souza said.

    UK coronavirus variant on course 'to sweep the world,' leading scientist says


    https://news.google.com/articl…=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US%3Aen


    In the future, I think the key is going to be if something (a variant) is particularly problematic with the vaccines," she told the BBC's Newcast podcast.


    The group that Peacock heads up was created in April 2020 and brings together highly-respected experts and institutes to collect, sequence and analyze genomes of the virus, as part of the U.K.'s pandemic response. To date, it has tracked the genetic history of more than 250,000 samples of the virus.


    The consortium first detected the more infectious mutation of the virus, dubbed the "British variant" and formally known as "B1.1.7," in Kent in southeast England in September 2020 through retrospective analysis of virus samples.


    Click here to view interactive content

    Viruses mutate all the time, but experts become concerned when a virus mutates to become more transmissible, as in this case, or more deadly. The higher infection rates associated with the variant identified in the U.K. are likely to lead to more hospitalizations and, sadly, more deaths. As a result, containing it has become a priority.


    The variant spread quickly throughout the southeast of England and London, and has now become the dominant strain in the U.K. It has also been detected in more than 80 countries, according to the World Health Organization's latest count, sending health authorities scrambling to isolate cases, although it's believed that this more virulent strain is already widely in circulation.

    this should concern is all as it was the Chinese New year that kick this pandemic into high gear.


    The Latest: Jump in cases worries S. Korea as holiday starts


    https://apnews.com/article/yos…248602e3bfe19e297c74d849a


    SEOUL, South Korea — South Korea has reported 504 new coronavirus cases for the latest 24-hour period. It is the highest daily jump in about two weeks and raising worries about a potential surge as the country begins the Lunar New Year’s holidays.


    Health officials said Thursday the newly reported cases took the country’s total for the pandemic to 82,434, with 1,496 deaths related to COVID-19.


    In recent weeks, South Korea’s caseload has displayed a gradual downward trajectory largely thanks to stringent distancing rules such as a ban on social gatherings of five or more people.


    Officials have urged the public to maintain vigilance and stay at home during the four-day Lunar New Year’s holidays that began Thursday. Millions of people were expected to travel across the country to visit hometowns and return home during the holidays.

    This is manufactuered drivel, thrall, a story by the saboteurs who create a fictional dialectic to engage you. Oh the tragedy, vaccine vial hero saves mankind and loses his job.

    Quote from JedRothwell

    And you know this because . . .


    Oh wait. You made that up.

    It is a story put on the front page of the NY Times that's what it is there for. The whole paper is mind control, we all know that. It is fully exposed. They are deplatforming GBD Declaration, Del Bigtree, RFK from Facebook/Instagram. The scam is now obvious. Your vaccine promotion work wont' help it.

    • Official Post

    The article makes the assumption that comprehensive lockdowns work better than what they call "lockdown lights". That Germany got complacent after shutting everything down last spring, and by easing those restrictions they are now suffering the consequences.


    Is the NYT's premise correct though...that a lockdown works better than lockdown light, or even no shutdown at all?

    Quote from Curbina

    This kind of publications, which is from a team of Indian academic researchers, has only fueled the speculation and histeria (this one in particular being used as a "evidence that the virus was artificially created as a bioweapon". So, the fact that Google and the WHO are joining efforts to quench the disinfo spread can only be taken as a positive development.


    https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.01.30.927871v1

    As I mentioned before,

    I would not be surprised if Covid 19 was manufactured and purpose built to exactly what it did.

    Next will come a modified version, rinse repeat

    Quote from Navid

    It is a story put on the front page of the NY Times that's what it is there for. The whole paper is mind control, we all know that. It is fully exposed. They are deplatforming GBD Declaration, Del Bigtree, RFK from Facebook/Instagram. The scam is now obvious. Your vaccine promotion work wont' help it.

    The New York Times is the Huffington Post of the liberal left, both pander to their bases and both are unreadable.

    Quote from Shane D.

    The article makes the assumption that comprehensive lockdowns work better than what they call "lockdown lights".

    I do not think it makes that assumption. It shows that is a fact. The light lockdowns in Japan had no effect for several weeks, and I don't think the ones in Germany or the UK worked. They had to get serious. That's what the data shows in these graphs:


    https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/germany/


    This either shows the fact that lockdowns work, or it shows a fantastic coincidence. The history of epidemics for the last 2000 years shows that lockdowns work. Isaac Newton among others went into a lockdown and probably survived because of that.


    An "assumption" is "a thing that is accepted as true or as certain to happen, without proof" (Oxford Languages). In this case, the data is proof.

    Quote from Roseland67

    The New York Times is the Huffington Post of the liberal left, both pander to their bases and both are unreadable.

    The Huffington Post does pander in my opinion. The Times may pander but it is also held to a high standard of truth, because it is widely read. When the Times makes an error, people on the left and right call it out, and force a retraction. It is held to a high standard not because the reporters are unusually high minded or moral. On the contrary, some of the ones I have dealt with are lowlifes and liars in my opinion. However, being famous and in the limelight they cannot often get away with lying. Except when they are lying about an extremely unpopular subject that the general public knows nothing about, such as cold fusion.


    So, for the most part, you can trust the Times. Again, not because it is trustworthy but because it is closely monitored. For example, if the report about Dr. Hasan Gokal had been fake, or highly distorted, Dr. Gokal and his bosses would be on national TV denouncing the Times. There would be a hue and cry. A big stink. The Times would not get away with it. Whereas if an obscure internet publication reported this, and it turned out to be false, no one would notice.

    Quote from Alan Smith

    Most of Japan didn't have a lockdown, and despite a lot of high-density housing in Japan and often crowded streets in cities

    They did not need a lockdown for several months in most cities. They did not need lockdowns because they implemented highly effective case tracing and quarantine. Every single case reported to doctors is listed in databases available to the public, anonymized, but with enough data to warn local people.


    They did lockdown and cancel schools in Sapporo at first. Later, they imposed lockdowns in Tokyo and Osaka that were roughly ~60% effective. Before and after those official lockdowns, many people stayed at home and did office work by Zoom. Many companies decentralized. The use of paper and seals (hanko) has been abandoned practically overnight, after persisting for years. Face to face meetings and hanging around the office for no real reason were more common than in the U.S. They have been greatly reduced. This has been widely noted in the press and in popular culture. Many people are saying "good riddance" and making fun of how long these obsolete customs persisted. I think the changes in customs and culture caused by the pandemic are permanent. People will not go back to the way they were living before. They interviewed some small company owners and employees on NHK who said: "We moved our offices into decentralized buildings and condos. Our operations are much cheaper and more efficient. We are never going back how things were." Commercial real estate has been badly hurt and will take a long time to recover. I have read this is also the case in Atlanta and New York City.


    All of the elderly people I know stayed at home, locking themselves down. They are still there. Very bored.


    At present the government has officially re-imposed light lockdowns, and the infection rate is falling. The death rate has not followed yet, but it will, I think. It lags by about 6 weeks. You can see that things got out of hand, just as they did in Germany. Most observers say the spike in cases at the end of 2020 was because they let down their guard, and because of year end parties and New Year family reunions:


    https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/japan/


    Actually, most people I know live in the middle of nowhere and have hardly changed their lifestyle. In many rural districts there has not been a single case because, as they say, "we don't get out much anyway." They mainly go out to feed the chickens and they gather in the town to make canned oranges and marmalade. (Delicious marmalade!) They cancelled all New Year's reunions.


    The huge difference between the infection rate in cities and the countryside shows that a one-size-fits-all policy is not a good idea. There was, officially, a lockdown but it was ignored in countryside because there was no need. They did put up this poster at the railroad station asking tourists to stay away. It says:


    Sou Oshima [the district] is recharging!

    Please come again after things settle down.


    [Local mascot orange creature wearing a mask]


    Quote from Shane D.

    The article makes the assumption that comprehensive lockdowns work better than what they call "lockdown lights". That Germany got complacent after shutting everything down last spring, and by easing those restrictions they are now suffering the consequences.


    Is the NYT's premise correct though...that a lockdown works better than lockdown light, or even no shutdown at all?

    One only has to look at places that didn't lock downs or have mask mandates, etc, yet their numbers also are going down.

    North and South Dakota are examples. It's the natural ebb and flow. Our brains are wired to naturally associate a result with some specific action previously performed, but often the result would have happened regardless.

    Lockdowns, masks and physical distancing may have some effect, but not nearly as big as people have been programmed to think.

    More trouble brewing


    UK coronavirus variant on course 'to sweep the world,' leading scientist says


    https://news.google.com/articl…=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US%3Aen


    "In the future, I think the key is going to be if something (a variant) is particularly problematic with the vaccines," she told the BBC's Newcast podcast.


    The group that Peacock heads was created in April and brings together highly respected experts and institutes to collect, sequence and analyze genomes of the virus as part of the U.K.'s pandemic response. To date, it has tracked the genetic history of more than 250,000 samples of the virus.


    The consortium first detected the more infectious mutation, formally known as B1.1.7, in Kent in southeast England in September through retrospective analysis of virus samples.


    Click here to view interactive content

    Viruses mutate all the time, but experts become concerned when a virus mutates to become more transmissible, as in this case, or more deadly. The higher infection rates associated with the variant identified in the U.K. are likely to lead to more hospitalizations and, sadly, more deaths. As a result, containing it has become a priority.


    The variant spread quickly throughout the southeast of England and London, and has now become the dominant strain in Britain. It has also been detected in more than 80 countries, according to the World Health Organization's latest count, sending health authorities scrambling to isolate cases, although it's believed that this more virulent strain is already widely in circulation.

    It's difficult to know the exact origin of the mutation, and given the work of the consortium it was likely to find new variants in the U.K. Other countries that have advance genome sequencing of the virus, like Denmark and South Africa, have also discovered variants. Peacock, a professor of public health and microbiology at the University of Cambridge, said sequencing coronavirus variants will be required for at least 10 years.


    So far, there have been over 107 million coronavirus cases and over 2.3 million deaths around the world, according to Johns Hopkins University.


    Mutation mutating

    Aside from the variant of the virus first seen in southeastern England, two new variants have appeared in a cluster of cases in Liverpool and Bristol that scientists are monitoring.


    The mutation in Bristol has been designated a "variant of concern" by Britain's New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group

    Common asthma drug can reduce COVID hospitalizations by 90% — study

    Oxford University researchers say steroid budesonide, inhaled as a treatment for respiratory disorders, effective when administered to patients within a week of first symptoms


    https://www.timesofisrael.com/…italizations-by-90-study/



    A common asthma drug can dramatically reduce hospitalizations, symptoms and recovery time among COVID-19 patients if taken up to a week after the appearance of symptoms, Oxford University researchers said.


    Inhaling the steroid budesonide reduced by 90 percent the need for urgent care or hospitalization, when compared with the use of the usual treatment for virus patients, the Reuters news agency reported Tuesday, citing the Oxford experts.

    Initial results, reached after a 28-day study of 146 patients, showed volunteers recovered more quickly from fever and had less persistent symptoms when treated with the steroid.

    Budesonide is sold as Pulmicort by AstraZeneca, which together with Oxford University has also produced a vaccine against the coronavirus.


    “I am heartened that a relatively safe, widely available, and well-studied medicine… could have an impact on the pressures we are experiencing during the pandemic,” said researcher Mona Bafadhel.


    Researchers were drawn to take a closer look at the drug after noticing how few patients with chronic respiratory disease were among those hospitalized with COVID-19 in the early days of the pandemic. People suffering from respiratory disorders are often prescribed inhaled steroids as a treatment.


    The results of the Oxford University research have not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal.


    Inhaled budesonide in the treatment of early COVID-19 illness: a randomised controlled trial


    https://www.medrxiv.org/conten…2.04.21251134v1.full-text


    Abstract

    Background Multiple early hospital cohorts of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) showed that patients with chronic respiratory disease were significantly under-represented. We hypothesised that the widespread use of inhaled glucocorticoids was responsible for this finding and tested if inhaled glucorticoids would be an effective treatment for early COVID-19 illness.


    Methods We conducted a randomised, open label trial of inhaled budesonide, compared to usual care, in adults within 7 days of the onset of mild Covid-19 symptoms. The primary end point was COVID-19-related urgent care visit, emergency department assessment or hospitalisation. The trial was stopped early after independent statistical review concluded that study outcome would not change with further participant enrolment.


    Results 146 patients underwent randomisation. For the per protocol population (n=139), the primary outcome occurred in 10 participants and 1 participant in the usual care and budesonide arms respectively (difference in proportion 0.131, p=0.004). The number needed to treat with inhaled budesonide to reduce COVID-19 deterioration was 8. Clinical recovery was 1 day shorter in the budesonide arm compared to the usual care arm (median of 7 days versus 8 days respectively, logrank test p=0.007). Proportion of days with a fever and proportion of participants with at least 1 day of fever was lower in the budesonide arm. Fewer participants randomised to budesonide had persistent symptoms at day 14 and day 28 compared to participants receiving usual care.


    Conclusion Early administration of inhaled budesonide reduced the likelihood of needing urgent medical care and reduced time to recovery following early COVID-19 infection.

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