Capitol Hill Blue Forums Science and Technology Health, Medicine & the healing Sciences Coronavirus: The Plague of The 21st Century?

I heard the 5.7 but not from a direct source. Do yo have a link to the 5.7 estimate?

R0 really has a fixed "infectability factor" from the virus, times a behavior factor. If we all had a perfect quarantine, R0 would be 0. If we had everything wide open it could be 5.7 or even higher. It's up to us which one we want.

As for the adverse cardiac events, Rheumatologists have prescribed billions of doses of hydroxychloroquine for their RA and lupus patients for years, at exactly the same dosage used for Covid-19 patients. And Covid-19 patients only get it for a few weeks. Those RA and lupus patients get it for years and years because their disease is chronic. They do see QT elongation, but it never results in cardiac arrest at that dose. A Brazilian study with chloroquine and more than double the dosage did see some cardiac events, but chloroquine is 5 times stronger than hydroxychloroquine. So that was like 10 times the usual dosage. As far as I know, hydroxychloroquine is still the standard of care for RA, lupus, and malaria.

Doctors have also found that Covid-19 is actually a disease of the endothelium (lining of blood vessels) rather than the lungs. Those cells also have ACE II receptors. That's why people still have compliant lungs but hypoxia: The capillaries in their lungs are screwed up. But so are their blood vessels everywhere. In the heart, the liver, the kidneys, the brain, the gut. That's why they get strokes. That's why they get massive clotting. So acute cardiac events in very sick Covid-19 patients probably have more to do with embolisms than QT elongation.

But that aside, very sick Covid-19 patients are not going to be helped by hydroxychloroquine, and very probably by remdesivir. You have to give them as soon as you think somebody has the virus, instead of just sending them home to see if they get sick enough to need oxygen in the hospital. The idea is to prevent the virus from replicating any more. As virus invade cells they are consumed by the replication process. If replication fails, they "die out". If you save your limited supply just for the sickest patients, retrospectively it will look like it makes things worse compared to no antiviral treatment. That's exactly what they did in that VA study. It didn't make it worse, they just gave it to dying patients.

These are attractive ways of thinking but some of what you're saying is contradicted by some of the data. Like I said, there's been studies of HCQ in milder cases, equally useless, and the VA study continued to show disadvantage for the treated arm even after adjustments for severity of illness.

As for the use of HCQ for 70 years with no big problems for malaria, RA, and lupus, I continue to strongly disagree with you that this anticipates safety for use in COVID-19. Like I said a number of times already, safety is disease-specific. I don't doubt that HCQ is safe for malaria, RA, and lupus patients, but I do doubt that it is safe for COVID-19 patients, as it adds cardiac toxicity to an already banged-up heart, given that the virus causes severe myocarditis, which is not the case for malaria, lupus, and RA.

Here's an interesting post by a pathologist about the origins of SARS-COV2:

Was SARS-COV2 Natural or Created?

It would help to be a biologist familiar with gene sequences and virus family maps to understand it all, but what it comes down to is a particular gene sequence found in SARS-COV2 that is not found in any of it's close virus relatives and makes it especially infective. He shows several journal papers in which virologists inserted this kind of sequence into viruses for experimental purposes, so it is known technology.

This has nothing to with the silly conspiracy theories about bioweapons. But this is the type of research that the Wuhan lab was doing, in conjunction with American scientists on an NIH grant. It also has little to do with the political blame game, when China and the US are partners at this lab. Lab accidents happen...

I agree that giving HCQ to a very sick patient is a very bad idea, because his heart is already going to be in bad shape. But the protocol that would be useful, would be to give it to him long before he had any such bad effects. If it does work, he would never get to that stage. The stage in which it might work, would be from first symptom to hospitalization. This is what some doctors are calling stage 2: When they would normally send patients home and tell them to come back if they have shortness of breath.

I've looked at an analysis of the VA study, and it appears to be completely useless: The HCQ arm of the study was only the sickest patients, while the no-HCQ arm was patients who did not get that sick. Of course it looked like HCQ did harm: When you just give an antiviral drug to the sickest patients it has no effect, but they were the high-fatality patients, drug or no drug! I doubt you can get valid patients-to-treat or patient-to-harm numbers from that mess.

To Republicans, please bear this in mind next time a report surfaces of sick veterans dying before getting a timely appointment.

I cannot even BEGIN to tell you what my wife and I see every time we go to the Long Beach VA, or the times we used to go to the Dallas VA, or even the Minneapolis VA, or the West Los Angeles VA.

What do we see?
We see thousands of old men who spent a lifetime partaking in every single bad health habit imaginable. Many of them had already received grave insults to their bodies because of their service but they compounded it by a lifetime of hardcore smoking, hardcore drinking, horrible diet, refusal to exercise in any fashion whatsoever.

If you want to see a collection of super-sized extra wide wheelchairs, no better place to see them than your local VA hospital.
I've even seen something I didn't think existed, super-sized TOILETS...toilets that are almost twice the size of a normal toilet, because they must accommodate persons who weigh 350, 450, even 500 or 600 pounds!

If you want to see a collection of lower extremities that have begun to turn purple or gangrenous, visit the VA. If you want to see diabetes so bad that the patient has to take up to ten or fifteen injections of insulin every day, the VA has these unfortunates.

My point is, there is a large contingent of sailors, soldiers, airmen and marines who absolutely refuse to maintain their health and refuse to see a doctor until their health has reached the point where they are circling the drain and the final countdown has begun in earnest.

This is the reason the VA has one of the worst "NO-SHOW" records in the entire healthcare industry.
This is the reason why veterans make up one of the largest groups of homeless in the country.
There's just something about the veteran mindset...many have tried to put their finger on it.

And unfortunately it is all too easy to just point the finger and claim that the VA isn't doing a good job. But when a man spends thirty or forty years letting his health go, and suddenly shows up in the ER with chest pains and purple extremities, and gets a referral to his VA cardiologist, and dies waiting, it's not always the fault of the VA. Sometimes they simply were too sick to save, and there was nothing anyone could have done.

Coronavirus outbreak likely to go on for two years, scientists predict a news article but relevant source


here is something more to the point
What Is R0? Gauging Contagious Infections

both articles contain links to other source materials.

That's what I thought until I saw the video about the polybasic furin cleavage site PRRA somehow getting into the Sars-COV2 gene sequence. The facts that this kind of enhanced ability to jump into humans was exactly what they were seeking at the Wuhan lab, and that inserting that sequence for that reason has been reported in several journal papers over the last few years, is just to much of a coincidence.

Virologists are claiming we don't have the ability, when we clearly do, and claiming accidents never happen when they clearly do, makes me fairly suspicious. I think this might be similar to what happened in Singapore, where they seemed to have everything under tight lockdown but ignored all their foreign workers living in crowded dorms and using public transit to keep on going to work every day.

I bet no leak occurred by the virologists and other techs working in the lab, but their cage-cleaners are just not that highly trained.

I suppose it's possible. But it's more likely this is just another new virus, like HIV and Ebola.