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Coronavirus

Coronavirus - The Poll

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Matt N said:
Interestingly, Boris Johnson is apparently going to announce tomorrow his tentative plans to return the country to near-normality post-COVID: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/ar...n-Britain-near-normal-coronavirus-crisis.html

His plans cover various things, including how to make the NHS ready for winter, how to get people back into the office and how to gradually remove social distancing, will span over a 9-month period, meaning that Boris’ plan is currently for near-normality to have returned by approximately April 2021.
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I don't think many offices actually want their employees back, me getting back into the office was more the supervisor having to argue there's a strong business justification for having me back.


I think companies like Regus and others in the office space market will be paying close attention to any plans about offices.
 
I like the part where Iain Duncan Smith claims that the scientists have got it all wrong from start to finish and that the government know best. Yes Iain, the government were absolutely right to delay lockdown by a week and cost many thousands of lives and make the easing of restrictions even more difficult in the process. Those pesky scientists!
 
The guy's an absolute twonk of the highest order his opinion on health is as valid as Farage's opinions on immigration.

On a much better note, a drug that can help us fight /control the disease is a much better short term option than a vaccine and it seems we could have one.

Potentially big news from Israel: Professor Yaakov Nahmias of Jerusalem’s Hebrew University believes that he may have discovered a breakthrough treatment for Covid-19. Remarkably, the potential cure is a common prescription drug, Fenofibrate, that is already known to be tolerated by adults without significant side effects. Fenofibrate is widely available in both branded and generic forms; many take it as a cholesterol-lowering medication.

Working with Dr. Benjamin tenOever of New York’s Mount Sinai Medical Center, Professor Nahmias was able to show that in lab tests on human lung tissue, Fenofibrate seriously impeded the coronavirus’ ability to reproduce itself, hugely reducing the severity of infection and its resulting damage. The team is enthusiastic, and told another media source that “within a few months, treatment with our drug could be turning Covid-19 into a type of common cold.”

The theory still needs to be confirmed in human trials, but there is hope that it can be evaluated as a treatment for Covid-19 very quickly. Because the drug is already safe and well-understood, researchers will be able to fast-track clinical trials. And retrospective data, which his lab is currently reviewing, should show whether Covid-19 patients that are already taking Fenofibrate have superior outcomes.

We have followed Professor Nahmias’ work for years through his diabetes research. When ASweetLife reached to him, he gladly agreed to explain his potential breakthrough.

Any virus needs to ‘hijack’ host cells in order to replicate itself, and Nahmias observed that the way the novel coronavirus does so appears to be “unique”: “We see a lot more lipid droplets in human lung cells as well as massive membrane complexes that the virus uses to replicate, essentially factories to produce new viruses.”

“The new corona virus enters lung cells and produces viral proteins that seem to stick to different parts of the cells. A few of those virus proteins shut down the mitochondria, the part of the cell that burns sugar into energy. This causes the cells to take up more sugar and start make new fatty acids and phospholipids.”


“Phospholipids turn into the membrane replication complexes and spread throughout the cells. New viruses start being produced and packaged inside the lung cells, then released to infect other lung cells.”

The bottom line is that the virus causes an unusual amount of fat to build up on the inside of lung cells, fat that it requires to reproduce.

This mechanism also may help explain why both diabetes and non-diabetic hyperglycemia appear to be such significant risk factors: “We see that virus-infected lung cells use much more glucose and convert it to lipids that the virus needs to propagate. It makes sense that patients with high glucose levels would be more prone to lung damage and higher viremia due to this mechanism.”

The virus, therefore, appears to feast on high blood sugar. And when a patient’s blood sugar rises in response to Covid-19, while it “looks like insulin resistance, it is actually mitochondrial dysfunction. Virus proteins seem to bind specific genetic elements that shut down the mitochondria. Without it, lung cells can’t burn glucose into energy.”

If a medication were able to interrupt the dysfunctional metabolic processes triggered by the virus, it could stop Covid-19 in its tracks. Professor Nahmias’ team experimented with several medications that could plausibly get the job done, including statins, but when they evaluated the results it was clear that there was “nothing like Fenofibrate.”

“The virus shuts down PPARA, blocking the cell’s ability to burn fat. Fenofibrate specifically activates PPARA, specifically reversing the virus’ effect.”

The team’s work was published yesterday in a preprint, and has not yet been peer reviewed.
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Source

It's still has to be peer reviewed but the initial data seems promising. Mount Sinai hospital has been very active in a few long haul support groups so fingers crossed on this one. Hopefully the peer review can come in quite quickly and we have another option.

The side effects seem as scary as any other medication but seem rare, thankfully.

Watch the price of Fenofibrate skyrocket and the US to buy up the world supply. (Seems cheap enough at the minute https://bnf.nice.org.uk/medicinal-forms/fenofibrate.html)
 
In other news, one of the reasons that there still appear to be a relativley large number of deahts in England could be due to how PHE are counting deaths in the communty. It is being reported that anyone who has tested positive for Covid-19 and subsequently died gets counted as a Covid death. So you could have tested positive in March, have fully recovered, then get hit by a bus and be counted as a Covid death.

Hancock has now called for an urgent review in to this.
 
Although excess deaths shows about 65,000 extra deaths compared to the five year average, which is less easy to explain.
 
Rob said:
In other news, one of the reasons that there still appear to be a relativley large number of deahts in England could be due to how PHE are counting deaths in the communty. It is being reported that anyone who has tested positive for Covid-19 and subsequently died gets counted as a Covid death. So you could have tested positive in March, have fully recovered, then get hit by a bus and be counted as a Covid death.

Hancock has now called for an urgent review in to this.
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Yeah agreed with the review, I was listening to talk radio stations today and ppl phoning in saying that even if the person had underlying conditions it was put in the “dies of covid” stats.

I did mention to colleagues that the wording of press reports was strange in the height of pandemic.

Ie Another person died after contracting covid.
Ok but what did they die of!


All a bit strange


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monkeyboy said:
Yeah agreed with the review, I was listening to talk radio stations today and ppl phoning in saying that even if the person had underlying conditions it was put in the “dies of covid” stats.

I did mention to colleagues that the wording of press reports was strange in the height of pandemic.

Ie Another person died after contracting covid.
Ok but what did they die of!


All a bit strange


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There's technically 0 way to say for sure someone died of covid-19.
 
They're now suspending the daily fatality figures off the back of this story while they look into the PHE issue.

What a mess.
 
Yeh tbf, I don't think Covid-19 has ever in itself been touted as 'deadly' - that's evident from how the majority of 'sufferers' have either mild or no symptoms. The issue is that in certain people, the symptoms can cause complications, especially when combined with other health issues - that's when it becomes a problem, but you still don't die of Coronavirus, you die of any number of things whilst having been infected with Coronavirus.
 
...and the complications caused by covid are not fully understood. Some die swiftly, some are in hospital for weeks or months before dying, some seem to recover then relapse and sometimes die later. So to pretend that recording deaths as covid related so much later is obviously wrong is, well, obviously wrong.

The world can't always be put into neat little boxes, however frustrating that is.
 
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Yep it’s true, a police officer kills you whilst kneeling on your neck and you then test positive for Covid that’s another one in the deaths column.
Months ago I said these death figures weren’t right and again looks like I’m about to be proved right.
We had about the same number of positive cases but yet we are nearly double the deaths, yet never even close to our health service being overwhelmed, it doesn’t add up.
 
Yeah but what about excess deaths? You could put every death this year down to Covid but that still wouldn't explain why 65,000 more people died than normal.

Those 65,000 would not have died were it not for this virus. Whether they died from Covid, with Covid or something else that didn't get treated because of Covid is just semantics.
 
BigT said:
Yep it’s true, a police officer kills you whilst kneeling on your neck and you then test positive for Covid that’s another one in the deaths column.
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We'll, yes it would be. Who knows whether it's in those circumstances it would be due to the actions of an officer or and underlying condition?
What's your barbed point?
 
As others have mentioned, COVID usually isn't a killer on its own, but it is a seriously aggravating factor in making what are usually survivable conditions, even those which are dormant and unknown life threatening.

In terms of excess deaths, yes they are higher but you can't instantly relate every death to someone who had COVID. There is a potential for quite a few to be not because they had COVID, but due to changes in behaviour since it came about. With hospital admissions down, are some of those people those who didn't want to go to hospital for a heart attack (admissions are down 50%), or other serious condition that wasn't diagnosed? Are they those in a care home who would sometimes be taken to hospital for further care but at present aren't? That's not even getting started on the hot weather we had too which can also be a factor.

So while a huge chunk of those excess deaths may be related to the impact of COVID, it's not necessarily that they all definitely had it. And that's the difficulty with this issue really. On the COVID related deaths front, many will look at those numbers and assume that every one of those deaths caught it, got put on a ventilator or whatever and died. Whilst on the excess deaths side of things you also can't assume that every single death is because someone had Coronavirus.

It's a tough one really, and whatever is done it's never going to be 100% clear. If all countries were quantifying the impact of COVID in the same way, then perhaps we would not be having this discussion. However, when case statistics are used to determine whether a country will allow those from another in, or when those statistics are being used to determine how severe the outbreak is, then they need to be clear, accurate and make sense - and at the moment that doesn't appear to be the case.
 
It’s all a bit shady. With the elderly ask to sign DNR forms due to the pressure at the height of covid.

Hopefully all come out in the report.

Another strange one, we are been asked to wear makes from next Friday in shops but the staff have no obligation to do the same.


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monkeyboy said:
It’s all a bit shady. With the elderly ask to sign DNR forms due to the pressure at the height of covid.

Hopefully all come out in the report.

Another strange one, we are been asked to wear makes from next Friday in shops but the staff have no obligation to do the same.


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Wasn't just the elderly, it was elderly and disabled ...
 
monkeyboy said:
It’s all a bit shady. With the elderly ask to sign DNR forms due to the pressure at the height of covid.
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A close friend of my mother told them to "Bleep off with that idea, roll it up and use it as an suppository"

She is an 90 yr old ex matron. And i love her brutal honesty.

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