SARS-CoV-2 Coronavirus (COVID-19)

Was just reading up how a boatload of money that USAID gave .... ton of cash to the Wuhan lab for bats & gain of function. LOL ... it just keeps getting better & better. That's no aspersion China ....
No wonder the opposition is freaking out claiming Constitution violations.
We used to call that the shotgun approach

 

Countries where health care is a government requirement have a vested interest in a healthy population. IMHO, the abysmal air pollution in Chinese cities was a major contribution to the Chinese successful EV efforts. So the USA may soon 'RFJ Jr' behind but the earth is larger than the USA which has no monopoly on clever people. Now we are making the bright ones not want to come to the USA.

Bob Wilson

 

I think Moderna, Pfizer and etc will continue to work on vaccines regardless of government cutbacks

 

Bigger worldwide market. I can always flip over the border .

Bob Wilson

 

And, lest it be forgotten, the same is true of naturally-acquired immunity: it does work, though not equally. I just got over my second COVID in < 60 days. Because I had just had it so recently before, I opted to decline Paxlovid and just let my immune system deal with it, and had only 3 days of symptoms, so, yay immunity!

Still, I had 3 days of symptoms. For "immunity" to work (whether natural or vaccine-mediated) doesn't mean you don't get infected. The immune system is always a defense player. It's not a deflector shield to keep viruses from landing on you. Its work starts when that's already happened. If all goes well, it might shut down their replication before you even feel bad (so you won't even know how many times it may have done that for you), but it won't always.

If the universe has a statistics department, there's sure to come a time when they update the estimate of L in the Drake equation with the final value for us. Then they'll know (but we won't) whether we came in above or below the median.

On the bright side, presumably whoever else is included in the stats will also have contended with WMDs, greenhouse effects, complex ecologies, and populist demagogues, so there's good reason to hope we'll be graded on a curve.

 

Paxlovid normally will clear symptoms in a day and you will often test negative soon after.

It is a powerful 3 pill cocktail and runs about $1700 without good insurance. Still it reduces fast downward spirals for people with complications and helps keep other people near you virus free.

 

Musk believes it is hopeless and is betting Mars is the answer.

 

I've enjoyed Paxlovid twice. Both times, the immediate hit on the symptoms from just the first dose has been a joy to behold.

The first time was back when it was covered on my insurance for nothing, so it was an easy decision. The second time was just in December, and I have yet to receive the insurance EoB that will tell me what that purchase actually cost me.

Both times I've used it, the ten-dose regimen has seemed to be pretty optimally chosen—in my experience, each dose knocks the symptoms down with a big magic sledgehammer, then they rebound some over the next 12 hours, then the next dose does the magic hammer again, and they rebound less each time, but even after the ninth dose they can rebound enough that as I'm taking the tenth I'm thinking "will this be enough?" but it ends up working just about right.

But this time, new year, new insurer, new deductible, I knew it would cost me $600+, and I thought "not even two months from the last time, my immune system's probably got this", and it turned out ok. Which isn't to say that by day three I wasn't thinking "to save $600 I'm going through this?".

 

Use Tamiflu to stop replication of the flu virus.

JeffD

 

These seem to be the current influenza antivirals. I've never tried them (or looked up their cost under my insurance):

Treating Flu with Antiviral Drugs | Influenza (Flu) | CDC

One perk you get with any Paxlovid purchase is a many-times-folded leaflet inside the box that explains a lot about how it works. It's two drugs, nirmatrelvir, which gunks up COVID's main protease so it can't do it's job, and ritonavir, which doesn't do squat to COVID, but was an existing treatment for HIV that happens to inhibit the body's CYP3A metabolic pathway and is included for that reason, because CYP3A would otherwise metabolize the nirmatrelvir before it had a chance do its job.

Because lots of other drugs also get metabolized by CYP3A, and are dosed accordingly, the inhibition of CYP3A by Paxlovid can turn other such drugs into effective overdoses, and there are lots of drug interactions to avoid. A family member recently had COVID and could not be given Paxlovid because of other drugs it would have interacted with. In addition to being a "strong inhibitor" of CYP3A, it is also an "inhibitor" of CYP2D6, P-gp, and OATP1B1. The list of drug interactions is long.

The last and longest stretch of section 12.4 is how they studied the possibility of Paxlovid treatment selecting for COVID main protease changes that increase resistance to nirmatrelvir. They saw it in low single-digit percentages, so it can happen. Just as with antibiotics, it is not good to stop a Paxlovid treatment early because you feel better; you could end up spreading COVID that resists it.

 

web.archive.org URLs are straightforward: /web/timestamp/original URL archived.

You could try deleting through the timestamp and slash, and see if the original URL is blocked for you. It will be a current page on the cdc.gov website, which since 2 February has been "being modified to comply" with new executive orders, but you may hope that page's content won't have been substantively affected.

According to the leaflet, the effect of gunking up the main protease where nirmatrelvir does is to render it "incapable of processing the viral polyproteins pp1a and pp1ab, preventing viral replication."

 

Martian temperatures are like coastal antarctica (well below freezing most of the time).
Seems like it would be cheaper & easier to set up shop right there if someone needs to populate a region that no one really wants to live in.
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