Coronavirus

[CLK350]

If you had "read all those", you would not (I hope) be posting false information.

If you are deficient in vitamin C from severe infection, such as when your level goes to zero during viral-induced sepsis, you can not orally replenish your stores fast enough to survive. IV-C is required to prevent or reverse the cytokine storm that destroys the lungs in COVID-19.

Here are quotes from scientists rebutting a disinformation article on the Internet:

Margreet Vissers, Professor, Centre for Free Radical Research, University of Otago:
The story of vitamin C and infections, particularly viral infections, is a very hotly contested area, and unfortunately for many years lots of claims have been made both by proponents and skeptical medical doctors that are not founded in fact. Fortunately in the past few years much better scientific data is available and we should concentrate on this and review it carefully. The papers cited in the article are mostly quite old and are criticised for this reason (not always fair). Here’s what I think is pertinent to the coronavirus discussion:

1. It is now well established that vitamin C is rapidly turned over in our bodies when we are sick, and that the normal daily intake of around 200 mg per day is nowhere near enough to keep up with demand. This is particularly the case for respiratory illness and sepsis. Also, the sicker you are, the more vitamin C is required to maintain your body’s supply. This amount was shown to be around 6 g per day for the severely ill[1].
2. Some recent studies have indicated a remarkable survival advantage when critically ill patients are given vitamin C. These studies have generated a lot of interest and there are a number of clinical trials underway at the moment[2].
3. We now know that vitamin C is necessary for dozens of critical body functions that require the body stores to be adequately maintained, and that we should maintain levels above 50 μM in plasma to achieve this.

Interestingly, a clinical trial for administration of vitamin C to patients with coronavirus has been registered in China. This will take the hype out of the discussions, hopefully.

However, prevention is quite a different matter than treatment. We really have no idea whether having more vitamin C will prevent anyone contracting the coronavirus. However, as it is a viral pneumonia, there is a distinct possibility that additional vitamin C may help with treatment. There are no studies with this virus that show this, but some benefit has been suggested with other severe respiratory illnesses. The clinical trial in China should address this issue.

Anitra Carr, Associate Professor, Department of Pathology and Biomedical Science, University of Otago:
People with severe respiratory infections, such as pneumonia, have depleted vitamin C status, partly due to the enhanced oxidative stress that occurs during the inflammatory process[3]. Administration of recommended dietary intakes (e.g. up to 200 mg/day) of vitamin C to these people is not sufficient to overcome the enhanced utilization of the vitamin[1]; they instead require intravenous administration of gram doses (i.e. 2,000 mg/day)[4].

One recent clinical study has indicated that intravenous vitamin C may be able to decrease mortality in patients with severe pneumonia[5], which is a major complication of COVID-19. Clinical trials are currently underway to assess the effects of high-dose intravenous vitamin C in patients with COVID-19, however, the results from these studies are not likely to be available until later in the year[6].

No, the Shanghai government has not recommended intravenous vitamin C as a treatment for COVID-19​

The widespread refusal to take Vit C more seriously into consideration is not new, and one has to wonder why this is so. The introduction of aspirin to reduce cancer incidence was also hotly fought by the medical authorities* just like any alternative cure besides surgery for heart disease**, hopefully the same will happen for Vit C, without letting all vitamins becoming reclassified as drugs requiring a medical prescription***.

To go back to Vit C, a few doctors have already established a protocol using it that essentially works 100% of the time. To quote from an article in Medium

" ..the highly respected Dr. Joe Varon in Texas is using the protocol and to date, has saved dozens of lives — does not move them to publish. “Did you know that 100% of his patients in the ICU are leaving the hospital and returning home to their families? 100%! He’s had NO deaths. Not one.” Nothing. “And what about the fact that his patients are getting off the ventilator in 48 hours instead of 10–21 days?” Crickets. “And did you know that with this early intervention protocol, patients who would have otherwise progressed to a ventilator in Dr. Varon’s hospital are remaining on the floor without needing to be intubated?” .. "

Well, dear readers here on the Tesla forum - as you already know how difficult it has been to believe in truths that go against the status quo and the usual way of thinking - please do consider, especially IF YOU OR ONE of your friends gets C19 and needs medical care, consider ensuring that their treating physicians are given this proven treatment protocol from the Frontline COVID-19 Critical Care Working Group Frontline COVID-19 Critical Care Working Group.

Regarding (*), (**) and (***), these are well known facts, I don't have time to dig out the proper references here, but FM me and I'll be happy to do so if anyone is interested.

 

[AlanSubie4Life]

Definitely. We surely still have more than 100K cases per day, and the more we find, the better.
Unfortunately, we get even less information about the active tracing ability.

Yeah. Everything is moving so slowly. I don’t get it. They have had nearly two months. It was fairly apparent this was the only possible exit strategy.

Good news in San Diego today - we reached our all time high on tests (about 3300, getting toward the 5000 daily average test goal), with just 3% positivity (~110 positive). Part of it was a backlog of negative test results coming in, but the 14-day rolling average positive % is 5.7%. Hopefully we keep driving that down to below 3%.

We’ll see how tomorrow looks. San Diego has kind of lucked out relatively speaking. We have 163 contact tracers. Looks like the target is to have 450 in San Diego. They’ve done about 500 investigations this week, they are at 5400 total now.

I think this should really bring down the numbers quick. The issue in a couple weeks will be new imports. Hope they have a good plan for surveillance!

At least we don’t have any sports teams in San Diego to worry about starting up again! I guess there is the Padres, but meh.

 

[AlanSubie4Life]

..the highly respected Dr. Joe Varon in Texas is using the protocol and to date, has saved dozens of lives — does not move them to publish. “Did you know that 100% of his patients in the ICU are leaving the hospital and returning home to their families? 100%! He’s had NO deaths. Not one.

Context here, since numbers matter:

As of late April:
1) Private for-profit hospital
2) About 24 patients had recovered and been discharged, some of them ICU patients. (Proportions unknown.)
3) 16 patients total in hospital; 9 patients in ICU at that date, 7 non-ICU.

Less than 50 patients as of that date total had been treated. Presumably about half of them ICU patients (so max of ~25 ICU patients treated as of late April, roughly, so max of ~16 resolved critical cases, with no deaths).



'We're all they've got:' In a north Houston hospital, overworked staff offers critical virus care


For comparison, San Diego has had 904 hospitalizations and 165 deaths (18% of hospital admissions). But not fully resolved yet.

So to get a similar result, Dr. Varon would need about 4 of his 9 remaining ICU patients to survive.

 

[Norbert]

Tracking COVID-19: UCSF launches statewide contact tracing training based on successful SF program

A seemingly benign online interface, which is being taught virtually, is now one of the most powerful tools in the fight against COVID-19. Along with people like Jensa Woo, it's meant to stop outbreaks.

"It's very intense work, very satisfying," said Woo.

Woo is one of 200 contact tracers in San Francisco, a program that has been so successful, it's now being replicated statewide.

Starting now, UCSF and UCLA will begin virtually training 3,000 contact tracers a week throughout California, all re-deployed civil servants, like Woo, who are not otherwise working.

"When we do contact tracing for measles, for instance, we find people fast enough we can vaccinate them against measles. If we do contact tracing for tuberculosis, we treat them and make them non-infectious very quickly. With this, the "therapeutics" are putting people into isolation who are infected, letting the disease run its course, and not infect anybody else," explained Dr. Rutherford.

"It's really people that you're in contact with at the workplace and at home, those are the ones we're worried about," said Rutherford, who said wearing a mask in public and maintaining social distance is key to avoiding not only spreading the virus, but also limiting who contact tracers need to locate and interview should you get infected.

The tracing outcome is also largely dependent on those on the receiving end of a call.

"Overall, San Franciscans have been very cooperative," said Woo. "That makes the work a lot easier."

UCSF Partners with State to Develop Public Health Workforce for COVID-19 Response

 

[kbM3]

No definite upper bound in so far as I can't imagine that people will go along with (much) more than 500K deaths. At some point, people will ask to turn around again with mitigation. Also, Trump wouldn't get re-elected with that kind of death count.

Ah my naive young friend. You have no idea of the power of the disinformation campaign:

Doncha know, those death certificates are faked! All those pictures of coffins and body bags? All empty. People are being paid to flood the hospitals to make them look full! The doctors and hospitals are in on it!

Only half joking!

 

[lascavarian]

Tracking COVID-19: UCSF launches statewide contact tracing training based on successful SF program






UCSF Partners with State to Develop Public Health Workforce for COVID-19 Response

I presume that with the launch of Tracking programs at the state level, we will have additional statistics to sort out.

Broadly characterizing, I guess my view is that "Stay at Home" and "Shutdown" programs are a form of passive response to the pandemic. A form of behavioral mitigation (by denial of hosts) of the spread of the disease.

Then we have severity mitigation in the form of therapeutic regimens in place a healthcare facilities.

Now we have a more directed attack at the spread of the disease with Tracking Programs. I am guessing that this will result in a short-term blip in positive testing results but longer term a further dip in positive test results. It might be helpful to separate out Tracking-based testing results as a metric. This is probably a discussion point.

Finally, we will eventually have the most direct attack on the pandemic with vaccination programs, a form of biological denial of hosts.

 

[madodel]

That is because the federal government has a surplus of "Federal use only" PPE & tests. You know those ones they keep for themselves and not for the states...

I suppose all the ppe and tests "intercepted" from the states is in a bunker under the White House.

 

[ZeApelido]

Looks like someone on Reddit is tirelessly trying to stem the tide of misinformation and irresponsible behavior.

They made the same point I did, and calculate an IFR of 1.3%. Not surprised.

The IFR will of course depend on the population and inherent attack rates. But, 1% seems like a good ballpark number we should ALL proceed with at this point. It seems like the data is becoming increasingly clear on that. Finally.

Can we stop credulously posting information that suggests otherwise? At least, we should try to understand why data that comes in may not be supported (and in the unlikely event it is supported and seems legitimate, incorporate that information into our understanding).
View attachment 539570

Hmm any chance you happen to like the Muppets?

 

[ZeApelido]

Looks like Covid can be detected in semen. Bet that test is more comfortable than the nasal swab.

Not sure the test administrator would agree...

 

[FoverM]

This used to be such a great, informative thread! What happened??

Orange Man Bad Disease. It's highly contagious in parts of the population. Key symptoms are:

1) Continuous and unhinged ranting on internet forums

2) A variant of Tourette's Syndrome where the patient spontaneously blurts out words like "fascist", "racist", "authoritarian", "totalitarian", etc. repeatedly and inappropriately (thought to be a form of psychological projection in the case of authoritarian and totalitarian, at a minimum)

3) Blaming OM for anything bad that happens in the world, regardless of the facts

4) And a new symptom of advanced OMBD -> an obsession with "sprays"

Strangely, the greatest concentrations of OMBD coincide with the greatest concentrations of COVID-19. Yet, due to symptom #3 above, the patient fails to realize that their fellow OMBD sufferers in local government positions are just as responsible for the COVID-19 spread in those communities.

 

[jerry33]

I have to confess it concerns me that you are kind of normalizing what is really a crazy point of view. The anti-vaccination movement is at its core anti-science, conspiratorial, and frankly rabid to the point of psychotic. To take Anthony Fauci's statement as potential evidence of a deep state conspiracy is also crazy. If you don't call out those kinds of inferences as such you are in a sense implicitly validating the paranoid logic of that 'movement'. Are you sure you want to go there?

Regardless of what a person may or may not think about Big Pharma or Big Supplements, vaccines are the high point of preventative medicine for specific diseases. The only reason for anti-vaxers I can think of is that they were never around when polio, and smallpox were endemic so they've never had any experience with relatives dying from viral or bacterial diseases (alternative explanation: mental capacity has been reduced with age).

 

[jerry33]

Elon likes it, I guess! I sure hope they can keep that factory clean.

Elon Musk on Twitter

He seems to have done a fine job in China. At the very least, he's had experience in what to do.

 

[TheTalkingMule]

This used to be such a great, informative thread! What happened??

Once it became clear that millions weren't going to die, it really f'ed with the mainstay lunatics here and they haven't been the same since. When your internal worldview is disrupted so dramatically, it takes a while to capitulate to reality.

Edit: And the mods stopped modding(read: Vitamin C)

 

[PeterJA]

The widespread refusal to take Vit C more seriously into consideration is not new, and one has to wonder why this is so. The introduction of aspirin to reduce cancer incidence was also hotly fought by the medical authorities* just like any alternative cure besides surgery for heart disease**, hopefully the same will happen for Vit C, without letting all vitamins becoming reclassified as drugs requiring a medical prescription***.

1) I'm not aware of any medical authorities hotly fighting the idea of aspirin for cancer prevention. WebMD says the American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association now recommend low-dose aspirin only for high-risk heart patients because of the bleeding risk from aspirin, but the United States Preventive Services Task Force still recommends aspirin with fewer restrictions.
Low-Dose Aspirin Might Cut Cancer Risk

I agree with the greater restrictions of ACC and AHA -- it is yet another case of whoops that drug is more toxic than we thought. Aspirin is not a big moneymaker for the patent-medicine industry, but its recommendation reinforces their preferred public mindset of taking drugs for "health," instead of eating anti-inflammatory and blood-thinning foods.

If you want examples of resistance to alternative cancer therapies, I could post a huge list, but the sneering-gallery here might suffer aneurysms.

2) I'm not aware of medical authorities hotly fighting a non-surgical cure for heart disease. They just ignore it, and don't tell the public or doctors about it. The authorities are not dumb, and apparently are aware of the Streisand effect.

3) I think you meant "hopefully the same won't happen for Vit C."

 

[TheTalkingMule]

Just got around to reading the Economist piece on smokers in France not getting cv19. Pretty crazy, but makes sense that a receptor could be already in use thereby effectively blocking the virus from attaching. Apparently patches and gum sold out immediately and they had to stop online sales in April. Lol!

 

[dfwatt]

Regardless of what a person may or may not think about Big Pharma or Big Supplements, vaccines are the high point of preventative medicine for specific diseases. The only reason for anti-vaxers I can think of is that they were never around when polio, and smallpox were endemic so they've never had any experience with relatives dying from viral or bacterial diseases (alternative explanation: mental capacity has been reduced with age).

I think it's broadly part of a backlash against Science and Technocracy, and part of an attraction to conspiracy theories that allow us to be smugly confident about the dividing line between the good guys and the bad guys. Instead of an ultra complex world where everyone in a sense is jockeying for power and there are all kinds of Shades of Grey and all kinds of degrees of corruption within all kinds of groups that disturbing complexity about human vulnerability is replaced with a simple formula in which there is an absolute truth, and there are absolutely clear ways to distinguish Good and Evil.

The best example of this is the Earth-is-flat movement which has been energized by a deep conviction that Science and Technocracy have conspired to discredit the great and completely literal truths of the Bible, one of which is that the Earth is indeed flat. This group has gone so far as to try amateur rocketry to get pictures that would prove that all of the other pictures that we've seen depicting the Earth as a globe were in fact forged or photoshopped or something like that. The funny thing is that since they don't have any scientific or technical skills because of their disparagement of science, they have failed in about 10 instances to get a rocket to adequate height to prove or disprove their hypothesis - more often than not with the rocket blowing up . It is funny that even anti science people sometimes need adequate scientific/technical skills and the scientific method. With all its problems, it's still the only way that we have for separating truth from our deep attraction to wild ideas, delusions, and good ideas that are just wrong.

It's a painful discipline, and frustrating because all of the restraint it places on our own proclivities. But eventually I believe if you really buy into it it teaches you true humility in the face of Nature. And the things that science reveals about nature are both humbling and beautiful, including of course our own nature, a subject matter where it has been my great privilege to learn from several great mentors.

 

[Paracelsus]

 

[AlanSubie4Life]

The only reason for anti-vaxers I can think of is that they were never around when polio, and smallpox were endemic so they've never had any experience with relatives dying from viral or bacterial diseases (alternative explanation: mental capacity has been reduced with age).

I think you are too optimistic. Fairly sure a significant number of the anti-vaxxers would refuse vaccines even if they had seen smallpox and polio. We’ll see coming up in a year or so. Fairly sure very few of them will get a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine, even though by then probably over a quarter million people will have died in the US (hopefully more like under 150-200k but we will see).

He seems to have done a fine job in China. At the very least, he's had experience in what to do.

Different situation entirely, but we will see. Hope they can avoid an outbreak. This virus is wily.

 

[dfwatt]

Orange Man Bad Disease. It's highly contagious in parts of the population. Key symptoms are:

1) Continuous and unhinged ranting on internet forums

2) A variant of Tourette's Syndrome where the patient spontaneously blurts out words like "fascist", "racist", "authoritarian", "totalitarian", etc. repeatedly and inappropriately (thought to be a form of psychological projection in the case of authoritarian and totalitarian, at a minimum)

3) Blaming OM for anything bad that happens in the world, regardless of the facts

4) And a new symptom of advanced OMBD -> an obsession with "sprays"

Strangely, the greatest concentrations of OMBD coincide with the greatest concentrations of COVID-19. Yet, due to symptom #3 above, the patient fails to realize that their fellow OMBD sufferers in local government positions are just as responsible for the COVID-19 spread in those communities.

Nice. We look forward to hearing about the results of your experiment. Make sure to rub up against people who are coughing hacking and feverish, but please don't visit parents or grandparents while you are busy proving that COVID-19 is just a deep state conspiracy to discredit the Stable Genius - you might not like the result.

Just one problem though . . . OM actually stands for Orange Moron

 

[jananglin]

Gonna disagree with Elon's response to pandemic problem done during JR's podcast. A thought experiment comparing Sweden's approach and its current results to the effects of the pandemic vs that of the USA's would be a good estimator of the mortality burden placed on the US. The US is about 30x the size of Sweden so an estimate of 30x the current US fatality amount can be used as a very rough estimate for the number of deaths. Those deaths would zip to approximately 2.2x10^6 people. However, the Swedes seem to behave more responsibly to suggestions and warnings of their government regarding social distance and group gatherings. These proscriptions may not be adopted in the same manner in the USA. Because the spirit of individuality is so strong in our country I think suggestions like above would be interpreted as an infringement on rights vs. preventive actions to protect against a greater spread of CoVid-19. But once large cities like NYC, LA and Chicago see rates of infection and death that are much, much greater than those shown in early and mid April then most people in our country would see the proscriptions were a good idea and we would become more compliant. So now the expected deaths to date for the USA would be about 2.4-2.6x10^6 people.

We need a new t-shirt that shows the determination of the American spirit and it should co-opt the state motto of New Hampshire. The shirt should now read "Live Free and Die".