Covid 19 virus

[MGoBlue]

Hope everyone is doing well. Rumors of marshall law have been circling here in the mid-atlantic region of the states. Having had pneumonia previously, I'm not really enthused about the prospect of getting this virus. Wife, daughter and I plan to stay home as much as possible but I'm fighting with my 20 yr old son. He just doesn't seem to understand how easy staying at home is!

Stay safe everyone.

[alanfjones1411]

At that age they think they know best.

[MacV2]

The current Coucil standpoint for operatives who do home visits is that the office bods will call each ahead each job & ask them if they are sick & or are they happy to have an operative call to do the job...Simples...

Except when the phone numbers are out of date or wont accept the calls...

I've had a few jobs cancelled & one I knocked on the door ( this was for a spray treatment for bedbugs ) & the guy said I havent been well so havent done the preperation... ''No worries Sir, taking two steps back, give it 14 days & call in when you feel better...''

[KermitLeFrog]

Just read about Chloroquine & Remdesivir, nice to hear a little uplifting news.
I Googled ( malaria drug chloroquine and the experimental antiviral experimental drug remdesivir )

It ain't that simple. The following is copied from another source.


“Chloroquine is an immunosuppressive. It works by suppressing the body's immune response”

No. At least not in the traditional sense of that word. In the antiviral, the pH of the endosome becomes too acidic for a virus to effectively bind to receptors. COVID-19 acts by inhibiting dendritic regulation of macrophages expression and binds to T cell activation continually causing it to send kill messages to cells that don't need it. In this case, the pH levels of the blood would deteriorate that mechanism and, yeah, in a round about way prevent over expression of the immune system, but via cytokine isn't even the pathway of action for COVID-19 nor what this medication is looking to suppress. That's like saying the thing that makes it hard to navigate a trashed piece of land is all the people there to clean it up, no it's the trash first and foremost, but yeah if a fire breaks out, you'd ideally want the people to GTFO of your way.

“and thus has also been researched as a treatment for autoimune disorders”

No that's via an entirely different set of pathways and in those cases it's not suppressing it's just blocking the pathway for damage. The immune system is still haywire just it can't find a good place to take it's rage out on.

“I suspect that the operating theory here is that, like the 1918 flu, in the most serious cases COVID-19 may be triggering a cytokine storm.”

No. The problem is dendritic regulation and T cell activation. I mean that with the assumption we're also ignoring the potential for secondary infection completely here. Add that into the mix and yeah, now, you're on to something. But the body reacts pretty standard protocol on initial infection, no storm needed. Just that killer T cells and macrophages just start eating your lining. So if we're going to get specific on culprits, those are the big ones, not cytokine.

“The body's immune system overreacts to the virus, and it's actually this immune response which kills the person”

No, it's the eating away your lining that eventually causes you to stop breathing that kills you.
“An immunosuppressive drug like chloroquine would seem to be a rather obvious way to help counter that.”
It's not an immunosuprressive drug. But ignoring that, there's some problems with it's use that I'll outline.

COVID-19 is killing mostly the elderly - people normally associated with weakened immune systems
It's not the immune system that's killing them. It's literally the inability to breathe. Lack of oxygen.

So here's the deal about Chloroquine. Put it in a 70+ year old and you'll kill them. Either COVID-19 will finish it's job or their liver, kidneys, or spleen burn in a bath of acid. The metabolism of a 70+ can't regulate the ionic concentration like younger people can. You might be able to follow up on zinc ions to mitigate that, but you have to test for that. Which is why when you do give this stuff to an older person it's usually in a hospital setting. There's not a machine that monitors that, so it's blood draws and lab tests that have to happen to regulate properly. Which means that's a lot of staff resources to toss at a treatment. The 60+ group can take it but they'll need faster acting dosing rather than you're run of the mill tablet form. So they need to be monitored too. Problems from this group are mostly along the lines of small blood vessel ruptures. So blindness, hearing loss, seizures, renal failure, and that family of fun things are in there for poorly monitored patients. But that's the key here, "poorly monitored". Regular labs should keep a patient fairly in good shape with a few decreased functions, maybe you get just a wee bit blurry vision but with time will get somewhat better. Again, that's ignoring tab forms of the medication, but those are long term slower acting formulations which that kind of defeats the point of using it since if you're going toe to toe with COVID-19 in long term, you'll eventually win. At any rate, you want to make sure you monitor well with this group and that's a tall task if there's people beating on the door to get into the hospital. I don't know what standard of care was used by the Chinese but if they were regularly using this method as it stands, then it's very likely that protocol was to have techs in the lab working 24x7 with brief moments to collapse and take a nap for fifteen minutes, maybe wake up and grab a bite to shove into their mouth for ten minutes before hitting the lab again. I mean I don't know, but going full regular with this stuff, and you'll be a very, very, very busy hospital with something that doesn't have a lot of room for error. Room for error to avoid damage, you've still got plenty of room to avoid death. But you know what, who knows?! It may come to that?
Now 40 to 60 group are a fun one when they start the tab forms, because this stuff likes to make you tendons a bit like jelly. So usually when someone starts it, they'll have some tear that "Oh I don't know how it happened!?!" appears after lifting something they were told not to lift. The thing is that, once they get a tear, they'll kind of want to get that fixed, but if you've spent all your resources for the 60+ group, you don't have time for this other group presenting. Because if you're going down this road of regularly using Chloroquine, your lab is going to be busy, your nurses are going to busy, and doctors well they just don't give a wombles and it's not like they can pull a lab out their ass or just personally attend your surgery, so they're no help anyway in this regard.
Less than 40 group, they just need rest, water, and to stop doing things that can harm them and they'll be fine with the medication. But that group isn't even the focus of this entire thing anyway, so you're not going to get a big bump in benefit going this road and at the same time, you've made them a little bit more susceptible to returning to the hospital for something completely unrelated.
The problem with COVID-19 isn't that we don't have treatments to throw at it. There's literally no shortage of methods for that. The problem is we need to increase the recovery rate. People need to get better, faster. This way they make room for the next person in line for treatment. Chloroquine is a slower method in people who would have recovered with ventilators and the current protocol. Not only that, it takes up more resources. The ventilator we can hook up to a hospitals network and let it do it's thing with slight monitoring, thus freeing up more human resources. Chloroquine does the opposite, it's slower and takes more human resources to monitor, which is kind of the opposite of what you want when you've got people waiting on treatment.
Now where Chloroquine is interesting is that its a method that might be usable in people who wouldn't respond well to ventilators and the current protocol. Those people are going to be in the hospital much longer anyway and are going to need way more care and time from everyone, so why not try that since they'll be here for awhile? But for regular use, unless there's some supplemental protocol China was using, it's too slow for wide usage. Small to medium hospitals would be overrun trying to monitor 50 concurrent treatments of this. And the situation isn't that much better for larger hospitals but they would have a much higher capacity for handling and processing concurrent treatments.
But all of this highlights the problem of people's understanding of this. Saving lives is like a side quest at this point. We save them, hooray! We don't, oh no. The main quest is to get people moving through the system much faster than we currently are moving them. It's not a lack of options, it's the lack of an accelerator pedal on the process. With as fast as this virus moves, we can out pace hospital's ability to treat pretty easily. Will we get to that point, don't know. But what is known is that if we don't start speeding up the process of recovery and slowing down the process of spread, it's all but a foregone conclusion that the healthcare system will "be somewhat depressed in operation" (ie Italy). But all the other stuff that sends people to the hospital still happens, even during a pandemic. So you have a game of resource allocation and those resources are disappearing faster because of said pandemic. So you only want to go with slower option, if you absolutely have to, not only because of pandemic, but because of all that other stuff that's still happening.
Now Chloroquine may prove to be useful in some of the worse cases, woo hoo! But if its use slows everyone working in the hospital, then selecting that as treatment is going to be reserved to just the worse cases.

[tony.mon]

Bet the Metro doesn't print it!

Interesting, thanks for putting the time into that, Ian.

[MacV2]

https://tfl.gov.uk/info-for/media/press ... tcmp=62502

[tony.mon]

https://tfl.gov.uk/info-for/media/press ... tcmp=62502

Woohoo!
I can use the cb600 again.
All I have to do is free off and rebuild the brakes, get it mot'd, taxed and insured...... Oh. Maybe not, then.

Then there's the fact that my employer wants me to work from home, but frankly, 24 hours a day in the close proximity of my family is not a pleasant experience. For them or for me!
I'd rather travel in to Southwark.

[alanfjones1411]

not that i'm bored with self isolation,but how come i have 7493 grains of rice in one packet but only 7261 in the other packet?

[VTRsquid]

How many grannies did you have to elbow in the neck to get two packs of rice?

[Commando77]

Daughter works for student union in a uni with a high oriental population.... You can imagine the grief they're getting in town. Just wish we weren't so cheap and could afford to buy from nearer home.... If we hadn't shut down domestic manufacturing that is.... Still, irrational you might say but I won't be buying anything Chinese again.... They just don't get food standards the way we in Europe have to comply.... Rant over!

[Wicky]

Italians vs Spanish vs English

[Wicky]

Popped out to shop and fix a cricket club banner that was a bit flappy from the winter, managed to gash my thumb with Stanley knife when cutting heavy duty cable ties and as I'm on blood thinners gush the fresh red stuff a bit more than normal. Luckily in my m/c tankbag I had a greasy rag so improvised a bandage as best I could. Bimbled off around town which without schoool run traffic had a distinct Sunday feel with shut up shops and patchy footfall . Looked in at the barbers as about due a trim but they've shut up shop. In 3 months time I expect we'll be all looking very 1970s / Catweazel...



Local co-op was stripped bare of fresh meat, dried foodstuffs and bog roll as primary targets for raiding despite imposed limits. Everyone shiftily playing personal space bumper cars, while looking in vain for eggs and tins of sardines, and especially in the checkout queue. Paid for my purchases contactless, and as I left I glanced back and noticed why folk were giving me a paranoid level wild berth - I'd left a halloween style trail of bloody crimson dripson the floor all along the store floor - then when back at the bike I looked in the mirror noticed I'd also a vampiric apprearance around the lips and chin from when I first sucked the blood before applying the now soggy overflowing rag. Another routine sunny Spring day in dystopia...

[Kev L]

That looks like some residents of Grain in them there photographical images them do!

[mik_str]

not that i'm bored with self isolation,but how come i have 7493 grains of rice in one packet but only 7261 in the other packet?

LOL

[MacV2]

That looks like some residents of Grain in them there photographical images them do!

Why I Ortahhhh...