Fighting Covid 19

Necessity is the mother of invention. My heart goes to all those in our community and those around the world that have loss and suffering to the virus and also to our amazing frontline medical caregivers as well the many workers providing essential goods and services making great sacrifice to save lives. This virus is a war on all of us. And in war we must arise to the occasion. In peacetime you can operate a system in a certain mode but in wartime you must innovate and adapt to overcome your enemy. Leading up to world war 2 The French were prepared to fight a long drawn out trench war with Germany as they had in world war 1. But the Germans didn’t want to fight that war and came up with a new strategy utilizing the so called blitzkreig with great success.

Now is the time for us to innovate. Now is the time to experiment and trial against a new enemy as you know the outcomes if you do not potentially a long drawn out trench war with great casualties overwhelming our medical,system. We have amazing and brilliant doctors around the country and the world that need to be allowed to engage the virus enemy with a multi pronged therapeutic approach to determine expeditiously the best possible medical outcomes. In this battle we need to let the doctors at the level of care innovate and practice their art while minimizing as best possible the hinderance that has become our medical system.

In war there is short term and medium term tactical battles (goals) and then there are the longer term strategic battle (goals) that must be achieved for the war to be won. We need to isolate and slow the spread of the virus flattening the curve giving time and also greatly increasing our testing . Our short term goal is to use currently available approved drugs and treatments that reduce the severity of the virus and respiratory distress syndrome shortening hospital stay time improving the overall outcomes. There are many possible drugs to choose from. I think that we will likely need to come up with a multi drug treatment to treat this virus or symptoms as is the case of HIV treatment (Kaletra) utilizing two drugs to effectively eliminate the hiv virus. Reports from France using chloroquine and azithromycin reporting better outcome against the virus.( this is anecdotal needing more evidence and mixing these two drugs may have cardiac risk) The medium term goal should involve developing a prophylactic treatment possibly involving the convalescent plasma particularly for those at highest risk and medical caregivers. The long term goal is creating a safe effective vaccine that will eliminate the threat of this virus as we have done with smallpox and polio.

The virus enters into the cell via the ace 2 recpt. This is an important receptor and the mechanism for the virus pathology is likely due to some effects related to this angiotensin and the ace 2 receptor system. See attached video. These effects on the angiotensin system make it quite possibly a good place to attack the virus and also a good place to possibly treat the resulting respiratory distress syndrome.

V is for victory over the virus.

Hello, Scott. Although I’m not able to comment on your post in a technical way, I do want to say that we’ll all have to work together to overcome the challenges we currently face. I somehow suspect we don’t know yet what all these challenges will be. But history tells us that every time humanity faces a major crisis, we open up doors of learning, innovation, and compassion we didn’t know were there. Let’s hope it’s the same this time.

Why is it that very high proportion of virus evolve from China?

Welcome to the Forum @learningU! Thanks for posting this. It will be interesting to look back on this time in some months (or years) and see what we got right, and what we missed. Also, will society look different from here on out, or is this a temporary blip? How often might we expect these novel viruses?

What proportion?

High compared to what?

High compared to countries with only a fifth their population?

Say India and any other country except the whole African continent. India doesn’t seem to create deadly viruses.

What are the proportions? Where do you get your figures? How do you interpret them?

The last viral pandemic on this scale was Spanish flu a hundred years ago. Which was British actually.

AIDS is W. African. West Nile disease is E.

Only 2 / 67 epidemics in the past 20 years were Chinese. And only 2 in the previous 200 too…

What are your figures?

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Thank you Jennifer. I am sure that we will innovate and adapt to this pandemic. It is the very nature of our being. Life always adapts to challenges. We have great technology and understanding of this virus. I cannot stress too much that we have to let the front line doctors respond to this. This virus is presenting with acute respiratory syndrome symptoms that they have not experienced and which the standard of care is insufficient and a battle that we will lose because of the shortage of ventilators and the extended time that patients will be in the hospital icu.
Simply said they have to find a better way to treat the severely effected to reduce the need for ventilation, hospital time and improve outcomes. They have to trial on these patients to better find what works. This is being done in NY and perhaps elsewhere where they are looking at the Hydroxychloroquine and maybe Zithromycin as well as starting the convalescent plasma use. In addition they really need to look at what is called the Angiotensin receptor Blockers such as Losaratan to evaluate its use against the virus and to see if it is effective perhaps in combination with other drugs at reducing the severity of ARDS as has been reported. We do not have the luxury of awaiting long term trials to access the effectiveness of these treatments but have to set up studies on the run here now to quickly assess their efficacy.

And how many of those Pandemics or Epidemics were viral and from India?

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(& yes that is a complete sentence)

Not really new to the forum, just posting under a new name, I believe.

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