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End the Fear: There Is a Treatment for Coronavirus
As I wrote before, in “Cue the Congas, Chloroquine Cures Corona,” there is now an effective treatment (and preventative!) for COVID-19. The story is now getting coverage and more press, which is very important so we can lift all this “shelter in place” nonsense. Woo-hoo!
On Thursday, Donald Trump announced that the FDA has now formally allowed prescribing chloroquine for Covid-19. You can read the papers here.
There’s also new study in the prestigious journal Nature, “Remdesivir and chloroquine effectively inhibit the recently emerged novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) in vitro.” The excerpt:
Chloroquine, a widely-used anti-malarial and autoimmune disease drug, has recently been reported as a potential broad-spectrum antiviral drug. Chloroquine is known to block virus infection by increasing endosomal pH required for virus/cell fusion, as well as interfering with the glycosylation of cellular receptors of SARS-CoV. Our time-of-addition assay demonstrated that chloroquine functioned at both entry, and at post-entry stages of the 2019-nCoV infection in Vero E6 cells (Fig. 1c, d). Besides its antiviral activity, chloroquine has an immune-modulating activity, which may synergistically enhance its antiviral effect in vivo. Chloroquine is widely distributed in the whole body, including lung, after oral administration. The EC90 value of chloroquine against the 2019-nCoV in Vero E6 cells was 6.90 μM, which can be clinically achievable as demonstrated in the plasma of rheumatoid arthritis patients who received 500 mg administration.11 Chloroquine is a cheap and a safe drug that has been used for more than 70 years and, therefore, it is potentially clinically applicable against the 2019-nCoV.
Let’s stop all this nonsense and get everyone’s lives back on track!
Published in General
There is apparently a study about to commence in a Colorado county using a brand new test that looks for antibodies to the Coronavirus in the blood.
https://www.sanmiguelcountyco.gov/CivicAlerts.aspx?AID=478
Basically they are going to try to test the entire county (the part of Colorado where Telluride is-SW Colorado) to try to figure out how many people may have already been infected with the virus and had minimal/no symptoms. This kind of data is needed.
Sorry, but that is yet to be proven.
Probably fair to say the old numbers will need to be adjusted. Not fair to say that it’s a settled matter now that we won’t run out.
Fun fact: after increasing for six straight days, the number of US deaths today was 8 fewer than yesterday. Coincides with growing use of chloroquine. Coincidence? Yeah, maybe. But maybe not, too.
Yay! That is the best news I’ve heard all day.
If we can identify people who are immune either genetically or through recent exposure, that will allow the country to function sanely again.
Careful, or we’ll get the double bump: a second wave of infections because there is no “herd immunity”.
A very good point. We do this with the flu every year. Yes, sadly there are deaths, but we keep going.
Chloroquine has been given to coronavirus patients for quite some time now, as have many other drugs.
There have been several reports and interviews in the medical literature and elsewhere that doctors are trying out every drug in their hospital pharmacy on Covid-19 patients, including chloroquine. I know it’s been used in my local hospital and also at quite a few in Northern Italy.
It’s heartening to know that most doctors, when confronted with patients helplessly dying in front of them, apparently don’t give a rat’s behind whether or not a drug is officially approved.
Thx, and that makes sense, but doesn’t that imply that it isn’t quite the game-changer we hope ? That is, “We’ve been using this great treatment a lot, but now we’re going to use it even more” is not as impactful as “We’re rolling out a game-changing new treatment”.
Hopefully this is a matter of scale — that there’s room for the scale of this treatment to be massively greater and so for the situation to be massively improved.
That’s certainly the most obvious interpretation.
A more optimistic possibility is that even though doctors have been giving their patients quinolone, they either haven’t been noticing its positive effects or they haven’t been administering it optimally.
It’s often very difficult to tell if a drug is truly effective against an infectious disease even without the fog of ICU war – since every patient is a unique case, the crazy mixture of outcomes rarely paints an obvious picture. That’s why we run well-documented clinical trials. Now add the chaos of an ICU with patients continuously dying and new patients coming in, and it becomes even more difficult to tell whether a drug works.
Plus, there can be huge differences in the efficacy of a drug based on whether or not it’s given to the right patient at the right time at the right dose. That’s also something that is difficult to determine in routine clinical practice but could be tested in a study.
So there is cause for some guarded optimism. Either way, we’ll probably know pretty soon since the disease has a relatively rapid course.
Got it thx that helps
Lets hope we can start up drug factory here in America to make our own drugs in case of emergencies.