Both protect against bacterial pneumonia.
Pneumococcal conjugate vaccine (called PCV13) protects against 13 types of pneumococcal bacteria.
PPSV23 (pneumococcal polysaccharide vaccine) protects against 23 types of pneumococcal bacteria. This vaccine helps prevent invasive infections like meningitis and bacteremia.
The ānormalā CDC recommendations are vaccinate children under 2 and adults over 65, but they recommend one shot of PPSV23 for people with diabetes mellitus; itās not clear if that is because of studies on T1 or T2.
Sounds like a reasonable precaution. It will be interesting to see if the CDC lower their general age guideline now.
Iām not 65 and both pneumonia vaccines were recommended by my PCP.
Again, the type of pneumonia with COVID-19 isnāt prevented by any vaccines, until they develop one specifically for COVID-19. Vaccines for bacterial pneumonia will not help prevent this virus from causing damage. Still probably a good idea to get them to prevent bacterial pneumonia too (which in theory could happen as an additional infection), but thatās not what is disabling and killing people in this case. What develops is called bilateral interstitial pneumonia, and with COVID-19, it occurs because once the virus infects lung tissue, the immune system reacts to fight it, and the result inflames and damages the lungs, preventing them from being able to absorb oxygen adequately. It is not bacterial in nature.
I was supposed to fly to a conference in early April, and while the conference has not been canceled yet (word is it will be in the next few days), my university suspended all sponsored travel (like many others), all large meetings/grand rounds/etc, and I am waiting any day now for classes to shift to online-only. Iām bummed because, in addition to giving a talk, I was actually due to receive an award at this conference and was really excited about it. My biggest concerns right now though are for the place I do clinical work in, because if we have to suspend services, it leaves a lot of youth without a safe space and needed access to food/toiletries/other basic needs. Same thing if schools closeālots of homeless kids rely on them for meals, showers etc.
This is what I find most concerning. It seems like people with autoimmune diseases are the most at risk.
Thereās no evidence that anti-virals will help, and there isnāt even a current treatment recommendation for doctors in hospitals. Doctors may be trying different things to help people, but there is no defined treatment plan for people who have COVID-19.
We bought a bunch of beans, rice, and frozen vegetables.
I have plenty of D supplies, but I missed out on the clorox wipes.
Maybe Iām wrong, but I was under the impression 7.3% was not how much more diabetics are likely to require hospitalization. I thought that number was the case fatality rate for diabeticsā¦ my impression was that it elevated risk by a factor of 6, so not that different from elevated complication risk for fluā¦
well, if you do get coronavirus, it would certainly be good to not also get the flu at the same time, so in that sense a flu shot might be helpful. The pneumonia vaccine doesnāt protect against that type of viral pneumonia but theoretically it could maybe help if you got a secondary type of pneumonia on top of the one caused by COVID-19?
Yes, thatās the fatality rate. Itās unfortunately not taking into account type of diabetes, age, or other comorbid complications, so hard to interpret re: individual risk, beyond that itās likely elevated.
The age skew in the COVID-19 statistics matches a similar age skew in diabetes; in 2015 9.4% of Americans were diabetics however 25% of Americans 65 or older were diabetics. The fatality rate with Covid-19 also goes up massively around the same age.
So when diabetics are selected from a study there is a much higher proportion of people over 65 and those people have a much higher Covid-19 fatality rate because they are older.
When you look at the Lancet dataset from two centers in China, age was the predominant factor, the younger folks with diabetes survived. I wouldnāt get too worked up unless you are >65
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)30566-3/fulltext
How about 63? 
Try to not to get the virus. We really need a bigger (Italian??) study to come out soon to get a better idea.
Iām not at all worked up, except that I canāt find any toilet paper and I only have two rolls left. And BTW, Iām 67, and my comorbidity is likely to be constipation.
Soā¦ Iām using this as an opportunity to get a backup for Dexcom. I just talked to MN Blue Cross and the guy on the phone said they donāt really care as much with refills on the durable medical goods piece so if your dr will write a script you can get one. My sonās dr has recommended we have extra in stock ājust in caseā so I donāt think I will have a problem getting the script to have a spare in stock- which would be great. I hate not having a spare transmitter- it makes such a difference on how well we are able care for Liam. (Also some Dexcom metals are sourced in China, so even though itās a US product, there is still the possibility of supply chain issues). Fingers crossed.
See this thread, at worst you can use @T1Allison 's idea of a hose through the window.
The Chinese study probably has the diabetes information; I couldnāt get to the original on chinacdc.cn, so I was working from the very limited information JAMA summary. China has about the same aggregate diabetes rate as the US while, so far as I could determine, the rate in Italy is about half our rate so may be less representative wrt diabetes. The Chinese study also has 44,672 confirmed cases of COVID-19 while Italy to date has 15,113 total according to worldometers.info (thereās lots of apparently good statistics there.)
Iāll see if I can get anything from the PDF; it seems to be downloading now but it is very very slow.
Hoping the stats from Italy come out soon. We 63 year olds donāt like the looks of the Wuhan stats.
This page explains the source of the data and has numbers. It also has good explanations of what the numbers mean. The executive summary is that the fatality rate starts going up at age 40.
Look for " Age of Coronavirus Deaths", then look at the next paragraph too 
Thanks for the article, now I have a little less anxiety. 
But Iām still going to practice āsocial isolationā as much as possible. Fortunately Iām retired and our business is cattle, so weāre socially isolated anyway.
I did manage to download the PDF, eventually. I mirrored it here in case anyone else wants to see it and has problems downloading.
They do give comorbidity data for diabetes in the PDF, but they do not split it out by age range. Realistically I wouldnāt expect any paper we might see to do that; we would need access to the raw data to do that analysis. The data set is also reduced:
The comorbid condition variable, only includes a total of 20,812 patients and 504 deaths and these values were used to calculate
percentages in the confirmed cases and deaths columns
My null hypothesis is that diabetes (which, in this context, means T2D) does not significantly alter the death rate associated with COVID-19 because the increased fatality rate reported for diabetics is wholely accounted for by the corresponding increase in diabetes with age.
The results for T1D will not come out of any of these studies; we are much too small a population for the scientists involved to be concerned about us given the massive scale of the problem.
T1D results wonāt come out of China either. China mysteriously has one of the lowest reported rates of T1D in the world; perhaps sometimes if you ignore a problem it really does go away [ironic in general to the point of sarcasm in this specific case.]
