As someone with ribs and other joints that sublux, that coughing sounds particularly awful, ugh.
I think it’s hard to take too much from any one case—there’s likely a ton of variability, but glad to hear some folks are making it through pretty ok. This was published, in which a 48 year old man with a history of asthma but otherwise healthy almost died from coronavirus despite ICU treatment: https://www.providencejournal.com/news/20200310/first-confirmed-patient-in-ri-talks-about-surviving-coronavirus
I think it won’t be clear until well after the worst of this the degree to which many health conditions increase risk or not. Seems like age and history of smoking are the most clearcut risk factors so far.
Unfortunately, I think we are likely to have a very large data set soon. Agreed that there is ton of variability, but nice to know for the milder cases such as the one I linked, it doesn’t require a different treatment scheme than the flu. Which isn’t fun, but is manageable.
Yeah I think for many, it’s like any significant virus, manage symptoms (fever, cough), isolate, and wait. Unfortunately unlike for the flu, we don’t have any effective anti-viral meds for COVID-19, and those anti-virals are a key part of the current flu toolkit.
My somewhat health-paranoid mother (she knows it, but as she points out, sometimes it’s handy) sent me a finger pulse oximeter, which is not a bad tool to have on hand if it’s affordable for folks and people have anxiety—could help you know if you’re at a point where you definitely need to go to the hospital, since if your pulseox is remaining good, you’re probably ok for continued home treatment. I also like it as an immediate HR meter, which I don’t otherwise have, so I’m likely going to use it anyway.
Interestingly, one of the drugs they are using as an anti-viral apparently successfully with Covid-19, is Plaquenil originally an antimalarial, and currently used as a disease-modifying anti-rheumatic drug. I took it for 20 years for rheumatoid arthritis.
Fascinating—it is working to inhibit immune reactivity to the virus? I know it’s also used in Lupus, and so it seems to function to modulate immune function somehow.
Yes, according to the Dutch national institute for public health, chloroquine has immunomodulatory properties and inhibits SARS-CoV-2 virus replication in vitro. Plaquenil (hydroxychloroquine) has a similar structure and might have the same effects.
Researchers have found a monoclonal antibody against SARS-CoV2. Of course this can still take months before this can be used in a clinical situation, but nevertheless quite interesting:
Pre-print publication:
I suspect the article underplays the importance of a treatment and overplays the likelihood of a vaccine, or of widespread vaccination for that matter. Given that COVID-19 seems to be relatively mild for healthy people a possible treatment sounds very promising.
Ebola is a salutary tale; the disease was first identified in 1976, the first vaccine in the US was approved in December 2019, conditional approval in Europe was granted in Nov 2019. So that is 43 years for an approved vaccine, so maybe 2063 for SARS-Cov2? Trials for the Ebola vaccine started at the end of 2014, so even when the promising vaccine got to the trials stage it took a further five years to test it for safety.
That’s Ebola, the situation with regard to any coronavirus seems less hopeful: