Covid-19 News

UK news on HCQ --

Daily Mail: Hydroxy is being discounted TOO SOON, say scientists who believe the

malaria drug could saves thousands of lives by preventing COVID-19

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8599809

BBC: Hydroxychloroquine being 'discarded prematurely', say scientists

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-53679498

Hydroxychloroquine should not be hastily dismissed as Covid-19 treatment, researchers say

https://www.standard.co.uk/new…onald-trump-a4518031.html

AAPS: Hydroxychloroquine Is Not about Trump

https://aapsonline.org/hydroxy…quine-is-not-about-trump/

AAPS: Big Tech Silencing Physicians: A Very Dangerous Road for American Medicine

https://aapsonline.org/big-tec…ad-for-american-medicine/

Australian regulators roadblock ivermectin --

No warp speed for Aussie Covid wonder drug

Why are we ignoring the potential cure under our noses?

How to Discredit a Medical Treatment - The Saga of Hydroxychloroquine and More

Whiteboard Doctor: A Tale Of Two Cell Types: New Evidence Suggesting Two Different Mechanisms Of SARS-CoV-2 Invasion!

- cites paper that indicates (in vitro) HCQ does not effectively block Covid

entry into lung cells expressing TMPRSS2 protease

- but, did not include zinc, so did not determine if HCQ's zinc ionphore activity

reduces intracellular viral replication as many propose

- perhaps, suggests that TMPRSS2 antagonists might enhance HCQ's anti-Covid effect

This recent preprint --

The DHODH Inhibitor PTC299 Arrests SARS-CoV-2 Replication and Suppresses Induction of Inflammatory Cytokines

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.08.05.238394v1

- may be of interest since the readily available supplement berberine also inhibits DHODH --

Computational and experimental prediction of molecules involved in the anti-melanoma action of berberine

https://europepmc.org/article/med/28729227

Quote from RobertBryant

" Industry sponsored trials such as those for remdesivir and other patented drugs could be particularly at risk of publication bias,

and positive results for these drugs might require more cautious interpretation

than generic drugs tested in randomised controlled trials independent of industry influence

Not mine.. but the BMJ comment was about Remdesivir.. and Gilead Trials

the BMJ comment may well be prompted by their memories of their 2014 publication in which they concluded

the benefits of Tamiflu were over stated and the adverse effects were understated..

Notice that Tamiflu was approved based on Roche-based trials from 　1999 onwards starting with the FDA

"Roche benefitted with oseltamivir by more than 18 billion $ since its launch in 1999.

The decision to approve Tamiflu was based on shoddy Roche RCTs

and the approving agencies FDA ...EMA .. WHO, never had the full data sets.

I can remember lecturers at Sydney Uni and pharmacy researchers ,sponsored by Roche ,extolling the virtues of Tamiflu in 2004

Full data were only extracted from Roche "after protracted efforts lasting from 2009 to 2013 "

and after the analysis of the data set the REALITY of Tamiflu was shown to be very different from Roche-sponsored truth

As of today.. the FDA still does not have a full data set..for Remdesivir..

The CDC states .. the full data set is not yet available ...but there is no indication of when it will be available.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4375804/

Interesting new research and findings (seems to contradict the plot of a "human-engineered" new virus by intention...?)

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-020-0771-4

Quote from zorud

Interesting new research and findings (seems to contradict the plot of a "human-engineered" new virus by intention...?)

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-020-0771-4

Fascinating and detailed study - if a bit depressing because these bats remain a severe and ongoing

threat to human health.

As with most conspiracy stories, you can never disprove them. What you can say is:

• There is nothing exceptional about SARS-CoV2 when compared with other zoonotic viruses that would make it more likely man-made, and no sign of such manipulation
• You have to suppose the US funded scientists in Wuhan are corrupt (and willing to put personal concerns before the good of the entire planet) by removing evidence of Sars-CoV2 if
• you want to suppose it escaped from the Wuhan lab. I agree that biosecurity there and elsewhere has flaws, so viruses they were studying could have escaped, but it would then need to be a virus carried by their bats which they cannot now find.

• The Chinese system at all levels will cover things up. Regardless of what the things are. Everyone is motivated to do that. Because messengers with bad news get shot. So evidence of a Chinese local or national level coverup attempt is not evidence that the virus escaped from Wuhan.

Still possible that it escaped from Wuhan, highly unlikely it was human-engineered.

20% of Covid hospital patients get acute liver injury..

Causes: Sytemic inflammation or adverse drug reaction

Use of lopinavir–ritonavir + interferon beta or corticosteroids was independently associated with liver dysfunction .

Use of drugs with minimal liver adverse effects is recommended .

https://gut.bmj.com/content/ea…/07/08/gutjnl-2020-321726

Quote from zorud

Interesting new research and findings (seems to contradict the plot of a "human-engineered" new virus by intention...?)

NOP: No contradiction at all. Just a mild desperation for being unable to line down CoV-19.

They (paper) exclude Pangolins for various reasons and only one hypothesis survives. Horseshoe bat! But..

Final papers conclusion: There must be undetected bat virus... But despite now 7 years intense search all over the world no new bat virus were found so far. ---> desperate!

Also bad: They believe the closest ancestor (must be older than 10 years....) lives around Hongkong. Quite a travel to Wuhan - what they exclude as a possible explanation.

Thus nothing new: The last good study identified an other bat as possible ancestor also more than 1000 miles away...

The only bat able to fly such long distances is the bloodsucking business man ...

...The only bat able to fly such long distances is the bloodsucking business man ...

Why not the famous disapperead (?) bat research lady that spent most of her live hunting bats with its viruses in caves all over China?

Quote from JedRothwell

I think you are off by an order of magnitude. It is closer to 0.03. I realize there are reports of undetected illness, but I do not think they are valid in places like Korea and Japan. They would never have brought the pandemic under control if there were 10 times more cases than they knew about. In these places, at the peak of the infection, there were at most 2 or 3 times the known cases. Now there are practically none. But they still lose around 3% of patients. In Japan they lose a smaller percent before because nearly all patients are young people, whereas before there were more elderly people.

No doubt there are many undetected cases in the U.S. because our testing is so bad, but the death rate is higher too, and I expect there are many deaths ascribed to other causes.

IFR ~ 0.006 from seriological studies and then there is another factor of 2 from tcell immunity

Quote from Wyttenbach

Final papers conclusion: There must be undetected bat virus... But despite now 7 years intense search all over the world no new bat virus were found so far. ---> desperate!

We have been looking for the animal origins of SARS virus sine 2003 when it was first identified, and still do not know them.

By your logic we are even more desperate about that, no doubt, and I suppose that also came from a lab?

Why not just accept it is difficult to find the proximal origins of zoonotic viruses?

Quote from stefan

IFR ~ 0.006 from seriological studies and then there is another factor of 2 from tcell immunity

That sounds about right - though the T-cell immunity figure is a bit uncertain. It may also be dose dependent, so that large initial dose can overwhelm it?

https://www.nature.com/article…-020-2550-z_reference.pdf

Quote from stefan

IFR ~ 0.006 from seriological studies and then there is another factor of 2 from tcell immunity

If that were the case, it would be no worse than seasonal flu. We would not have 160,000 dead people in the U.S. with only a fraction of the population infected so far.

Quote from JedRothwell

If that were the case, it would be no worse than seasonal flu. We would not have 160,000 dead people in the U.S. with only a fraction of the population infected so far.

Jed,

It is entirely possible that there are many many tens of millions of people infected so far, we just don’t know about them because they are asymptomatic and have not been tested.

This virus appears to be much more contagious than the seasonal flu, and it is probable that we will never know how many are infected.

Quote from JedRothwell

If that were the case, it would be no worse than seasonal flu. We would not have 160,000 dead people in the U.S. with only a fraction of the population infected so far.

Stephan's figures for US would work out (optimistically) as follows:

herd immunity at 40% infected (since 50% are immune). If these were drawn equally from population that would be:

300M * 0.4 * 0.006 = 720,000 deaths.

Obviously we are nowhere near this - about 1/4.

If (again very optimistically) you assume those at risk are well shielded - something I might believe of Sweden but not the US, you could imagine fewer deaths than this - maybe 50%.

The trouble is that poor people are not well shielded regardless of risk, and care homes are not necessarily well shielded - it depends on how carefully they can keep small numbers of staff and continuously test them. I don't know now how this goes in the US.

For 150K deaths so far, at this level, you have 10% infected. But, if there is a higher infection rate in care homes than in the population overall that could be 5%. I'm not sure what US serological data is telling us? Have not seen it.

One other depressing possibility. It may be that T-cell immunity is much more prevalent in the young. In that case the 50% fewer deaths due to immunity does not apply at all, and you double these figures for number of deaths at herd immunity level.

US new cases have been reducing quite markedly - 12% per week - for the last two weeks. That is very good news. But cases are dominated by high population hotspots so I've no idea how it will go over next 3 months. Deaths are a lagging indicator so these will continue to increase for a while.

I'm still not sure about how the virus propagates in different places. The worry is if the US ha R > 1 in rural areas. Starting from a low base this will not be noticed until much later on, but it will eventually affect large numbers of people in the population. If they did random sample testing nationally they would knoww.

THH

Ivermectin is a 'real killer of coronavirus': Professor

https://www.dailytelegraph.com…2bea15254d4f20ba5a9022e69

Quote from Roseland67

It is entirely possible that there are many many tens of millions of people infected so far, we just don’t know about them because they are asymptomatic and have not been tested.

No, that is not entirely possible. That is entirely impossible. There have been large scale, random antibody studies in China and S. Korea that reveal the extent of undetected infections in the general population. If there were millions of cases that were not detected while the patient was ill, these studies would reveal them. There were also fairly large scale random antibody tests in New York. These showed a significant number of undetected cases, because New York city is the worst-hit place on earth, but there were also undiagnosed dead patients in hospitals and people who died at home, which pushes the case mortality rate in the other direction.

If there were tens of millions of people infected so far in the U.S., we would have hundreds of thousands more dead people and our hospitals would have been overwhelmed weeks ago. That may still happen, but it has not happened yet. The administration and the governors of Florida and Georgia are doing all they can to make that happen! U.S. infection rates and death rates are far worse than the rest of the developed world combined, but still not so bad that there might be millions of infected people. Our biology is the same as in S. Korea. Their case mortality is better than ours, so if they don't have massive numbers of hidden cases, we don't either. The numbers would not add up.

I will grant that our testing is so bad, and our healthcare system in such third-world chaos, we have no way to accurately estimate hidden cases. However, in countries where they have 20th century grade health care (not even 21st century grade -- but what we used to have, decades ago) they can reliably measure the extent of infections. If there were thousands of undetected cases in Greece, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, Canada or any other country with a functional public health system, they would know it.

Here is the latest travesty from Georgia, where officials at all levels of government are doing their best to kill off the population. Two high school students took photos of hallways jammed full of kids not social distancing and not wearing masks. Naturally, school officials suspended the students. School Superintendent Brian Otott said the photo was "taken out of context," and he wrote what is possibly the most inane excuse I have read in Georgia so far, which is a very high bar indeed:

"Class changes at the high school level are a challenge when maintaining a specific schedule. It is an area we are continuing to work on in this new environment to find practicable ways to further limit students from congregating. Students are in this hallway environment for just a brief period as they move to their next class. ... There is no question that the photo does not look good. ... Wearing a mask is a personal choice, and there is no practical way to enforce a mandate to wear them."

As if a person cannot be infected in a "brief amount of time"! This sounds like the mealy-mouthed Japanese officials who want restaurants and karaoke bars to close at 10 p.m. instead of 2 a.m. Apparently they think the virus clocks in at 10:01 p.m.

Earlier, it was revealed that the Georgia Dept. of Health has refused to answer any questions from the media for the last several months. Perhaps this is a blessing, considering how stupid these statements are.

See:

https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/07…l-hallway-trnd/index.html

https://www.ajc.com/education/…TUNBDA2NDF7I2RHFLXR2MR4M/

https://www.foxnews.com/health…ess-children-adults-study

"The researchers at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City discovered children had lower levels of ACE2 gene expression than adults, according to the researchers."

"researchers found that “there are low levels of ACE2 expression in the nasal passages of younger children, and this ACE2 level increases with age into adulthood. This might explain why children have been largely spared in the pandemic.”

……………...

It makes me wonder if there could be a nasal spray that could bind the ACE 2 sites in the nose and reduce people's chances of getting it.

Quote from oldguy

It makes me wonder if there could be a nasal spray

Ivermectin as a nasal irrigation might work..not sure if it tastes too bitter

Anyone tried..?

it has worked for (myiasis) maggot infestations very well... .. maggots are gruesome but not deadly like Covid

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3361823/

The oral dose of ivermectin is 200 μg/kg body weight. The drug may also be used topically as a 0.1% or 0.8% solution in birds and animals.[10] It has been used as a 1% solution in the treatment of scabies.[11] Ivermectin inhibits neurotransmission by causing hyperpolarization of the neurons and myocytes of invertebrates. Safety of ivermectin is very high in humans.[12] Common side effects on oral administration are dizziness, headaches and muscle pains. No adverse reactions were observed in our patient.

https://casereports.bmj.com/content/2018/bcr-2017-224142

"We proceeded to irrigate each nostril with topical ivermectin solution,

which was made by diluting 2 mg of liquid ivermectin in 5 mL of normal saline for each nostril (0.04% ivermectin solution).

Within 15 min of ivermectin irrigation, the patient sneezed and coughed up approximately 50 larvae that were mostly alive, although with very sluggish movement. The patient continued to expulse larvae intermittently throughout the day as evidenced by dead larvae found by his bedside. The patient was also commenced on 12 mg of liquid ivermectin daily for 3 days. Nasal irrigation with ivermectin solution was repeated 3 days later and no further larvae were observed

IVM binds the ACE2 receptor a bit,,, but has other actions

It could stay around in the membranes of nasopharygeal cavity cells for a long time..because it is hydrophobic,, but might need something

to help penetrate the watery mucus

Zn nasal spray has caused anosmia..

Here is a review of other possibilities

https://journals.sagepub.com/d…/10.1177/0194599820933170

There is trial in Argentina of some sorts

https://www.web24.news/u/2020/…-to-avoid-infections.html