The Coronavirus Thread

My only guess is this is some kind of regional thing? My family is largely north indian (UP), and I don't believe any of the dozen or so relatives who have moved to the US buy outrageous amounts of milk. We cook with it, and drink outrageous amounts of very milky tea, but we get buy on ~1 gallon a week for a family of four.

My mother and her brothers grew up in a household that keeps cows, where they do make yoghurt (dahi) daily, but I just asked-- even there they purchase their ghee & paneer at the market for efficiency's sake.

 

But remember, food diversity from India is HUGE.

 

Not just chloroquine, but lots of drugs being tested for off label use against this. IMHO probably the best thing that could happen to stop this as quickly as possible would be to find an effective treatment that already exists for something else.

https://www.fiercepharma.com/pharma...med-chloroquine-to-help-covid-19-fight-report

Never been to India, I do love Indian food though. The spicier the better. Not sure if cows are really sacred to many there and roam around freely like the stereotype goes. If that is indeed the case I guess milk would naturally be a plentiful part of their diet.

 

Hmm, antimalarials - thinks quinine, checks gin supply, plans a tonic run to the supermarket...

I hope it's obvious I'm joking. The amount of quinine in tonic water is nowhere near enough to be effective at realistic doses.

 

I had a delusion about trying to pick up a few things at Costco during my lunch.
Line to get in was at least 50 feet longer than the side of the building, and you know how big a Costco is.
And the line wasn't moving since they only let you in when someone comes out.

 

If you are interested in the Chinese protocol for treating COVID-19 Zhejiang University School of Medicine put up a Handbook of COVID-19 Prevention and Treatment on Dropbox yesterday.

 

Made a grocery run myself this morning. Some items had bare shelves, was hit and miss. No TP, but I'm OK for a few weeks. I've seen some on shelves recently and passed, no need to feed the frenzy. Shipments are still coming in so that shortage should completely end soon.

As long as the farmers, producers, manufacturers and supply chains for essentials can keep going we'll be fine. If that starts to break down then everything will change.

 

I think going to a Costco right now would be analogous to getting in line to go on a cruise.

 

Just got back from Costco ahead Chicago's lockdown that starts tomorrow night. Lines to get in, limits on some items. Only one crate of eggs per membership, which is particularly annoying since my household normally goes through 2 a week. No TP, paper towels, or useful cleaning products. No rice. Most bulk meats gone as well except for the more expensive stuff. Not dire, but really annoying. Hopefully the lockdown slows things down enough for things to normalize just a little.

 

They do. But if you see them gathered around a rubbish tip, eating what they can, and plastic bags along with it, you might wonder at the sacred thing. And you probably would not buy the local, untreated, milk from the cowman that owns them.

There are, i think, quite often new uses discovered for old drugs, although it might be an economic thing that the old stuff on the shelf is the last thing that the pharma companies want to discover. They want something new with a patentable profitable future.

 

Back when I was working as a medical scribe, hydroxchloroquine was one of the most common medication we prescribed in the office for treating various autoimmune diseases such as Lupus. It's a wonderful medication that modulates your immune system with little to no side effects. I think my doctor told me that they found the drug from a bark of a tree.

 

No disagreement here, and some of the recent profiteering even with basics like epinephrine pens and insulin is utterly repugnant. But this time around, CEOs have reason to worry about their own grandparents and those of their friends. I hope that helps. I think it might.

 

I have to watch myself here because I am a contrarian by nature, but WTF is going on the US and Canada?
Chinese lost more than 3000 lives, I am assuming 3x as much, South Korea, Taiwan, Japan have the virus contained with small percentage of infections, and <1% of deaths.

In the meantime I hear about a million of Americans potentially dying from CV, 30% to 700% infected. Granted that is coming from a human garbage called dr. Oz, I did not even know who he was until 1h ago, but apparently a lot of people listen to him.
Why would America suffer 1mln deaths? No matter what's the explanation, the example of Asian countries shows that this would be almost like an act of suicide. Why cannot we learn from SK and Taiwan? And let's say that this will end with 3k of Americans dying, but the economy completely destroyed for years to come.

Don't we realize that the Chinese Politbureau is watching this and they cannot believe what they are seeing? "The only thing we need to do is to release a few f'ing bats, we will not even kill that many people, and those idiots will finish themselves".
I am not saying that this was and act of war, but they would be stupid not to consider this possibility.

 

At this point, everyone in the western world is trying to not be Italy. Over 4000 deaths, but more importantly, 627 in the last 24 hours.

Nobody believes China’s numbers.

 

At least there are 2 different treatments that seem to be emerging; seems like hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin have been mentioned here, and Japan has had success with Avigan (favipiravir) alone.

 

Everyone not in Milan & other swamped areas here is very thankful for it, that's for sure.

My aunt, mom & stepdad are there so uh ... I'm trying not to think about it? Everything fine so far.

 

But they stepped on it fast and hard, not so much here. Because of the long incubation time of this virus, it is, like our Chief Public Health Officer brilliantly said, it is like looking at a star. You see today what happened in the past - in this case about 2 weeks. We will know in two weeks how that worked out for us.

Killing off lots of old people could have a profound effect on your voting demographics. Whether that is good or bad is subjective, but in a country as polarized as the US it could be significant.

 

I agree with Marv. Anyone being killed by this is not pushing us into the future but being dragged into it by the rest of us.

I suggest we keep it simple and cheap but I suspect another Tamiflu will be discovered.

From Dr. Mercola:

While it's unclear exactly which treatment is the most effective, my guess is that Dr. Paul Marik's intravenous vitamin C protocol for sepsis would be a good starting point, seeing how sepsis appears to be what kills those who succumb to a serious COVID-19 infection.

Marik's retrospective before-after clinical study showed that giving patients IV vitamin C with hydrocortisone and vitamin B1 for two days reduced mortality from 40% to 8.5%. The precise protocol used was 200 mg of thiamine every 12 hours, 1,500 mg of ascorbic acid every six hours, and 50 mg of hydrocortisone every six hours.Importantly, the treatment has no side effects and is inexpensive, readily available and simple to administer.

It also reduced the number of days they needed to remain hospitalized. On average, those who received vitamin C had by Day 28 spent three fewer days in the intensive care unit than the placebo group (seven days compared to 10). By Day 60, the treatment group had also spent seven fewer days in the hospital overall —15 days compared to 22.

https://articles.mercola.com/sites/...d=20200308Z1&et_cid=DM478049&et_rid=825584335

 

Distancing is good... hygiene is important, too. At some point, pretty much everybody is going to have to stay home. We've all seen how this goes.

But what really drives me nuts right now is the lack of a federally unified game-plan. It's like the wild west of rules, restrictions, and exceptions right now and it's making a lot of people jumpy. It's no wonder compliance is so low. If everyone was subject to the same rules, it might be a different story. Nobody wants to be the one getting screwed because they weren't allowed to make the money they need to stay afloat. Sort of a really obnoxious game of "Who's getting financially fucked off of the face of the earth?" People aren't going to give up their income not knowing if the people they pay bills to will have to give up theirs. And then there are questions of where the US government actually has grounds to step in.

The only thing I see possibly working is to actually close down all non-essential business and have the banks extend all outstanding loan and mortgage payments for the duration of the 'big pause'. But I'm not even sure that's so great in the long run.

I see a lot of knee jerk with these emergency policies. Not a lot of planning or foresight. Did no government anywhere ever consider this to be a possibility? Seems like it. This whole 'day by day' thing to me just screams 'we don't really know the implications of the things we're doing' and honestly I have little faith in Washington actually figuring it out in time. You kinda just know it's gonna be a cluster at some point down the line. It can all be dealt with later, but that would take a very long time to sift through, I'm betting. And then in the meantime how many people are left in the air with who pays what? They need to figure that out, like yesterday lol

It could be a big problem. If they can't find a way for everyone to share the financial burden equally, and it put certain people disproportionately in jeopardy later, we could be looking at some serious civil unrest, or at the very least rolling economic issues across different scales. Sometimes I think more people are scared for their financial futures than the virus. Both are equally serious concerns in my book.

It's not the deaths that would hurt things financially, but hodgepodge closures and disproportionate policies on who does and doesn't have to take the hit for it. There needs to be more consistency and transparency on that. Most people would be happy to comply if they knew there was something tangible in place for the future. Otherwise, you can't exactly expect them to actually close down. It becomes a pick your poison deal. And when you're not telling them... they're going to do whatever they think they need to at the time.