Does the coronavirus merit investment, or personal, concern or consideration?

6101

A cheap SSRI type antidepressant fluvoxamine cut the risk of worsening health (hospital or death) in high risk covid cases treated somewhat early on by about 1/3.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langlo/article/PIIS2214-109X(21)00448-4/fulltext

the first large, randomised controlled trial to test the efficacy of fluvoxamine for acute treatment of COVID-19. We found a clinically important absolute risk reduction of 5·0%, and 32% RR reduction, on the primary outcome of hospitalisation defined as either retention in a COVID-19 emergency setting or transfer to tertiary hospital due to COVID-19, consequent on the administration of fluvoxamine for 10 days. This study is only the second study to show an important treatment benefit for a repurposed drug in the early treatment population… Given fluvoxamine’s safety, tolerability, ease of use, low cost, and widespread availability, these findings might influence national and international guidelines on the clinical management of COVID-19.

Mechanism is unclear. Could be anti inflammatory, could be anti-clotting, could be stimulating melatonin which is a supplement thought by some to help with covid.

6102
  • At Day 14, none of the patients who received fluvoxamine versus 60% of those who did not had persistent symptoms (e.g., anxiety, difficulty concentrating, fatigue) ( P < 0.001).

Is anxiety even considered a covid symptom? Kinda sounds like this antidepressant prevented the symptoms I’d expect antidepressants to prevent.

Perhaps depression is a risk factor for covid hospitalization?

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6103

The proposed mechanism for fluvoxamine is something about cytokine regulation rather than anything antiviral or psychological. The 10 day course used is not enough to have an impact on depression or anxiety, at least so I’m told.

6104

Brain fog, more carefully measured and calibrated, is a real covid side effect. Being hospitalized has about 3x the chances of these cognitive problems, so presumably the vaccine is helping prevent some of these issues.

In this study, we found a relatively high frequency of cognitive impairment several months after patients contracted COVID-19. Impairments in executive functioning, processing speed, category fluency, memory encoding, and recall were predominant among hospitalized patients.

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6105

Q&A with a doc that’s studying and treating covid, answering viewer questions. Lots on boosters, other vaccines, stuff about personal medical conditions and how they should take or delay shots, etc.

6106

Just talked to my friend who was hospitalized with covid last month and she says it is very real for her. She likens it to the brain fog she had shortly after giving birth, but lasting much longer (she’s almost fully recovered and found she’s telling folks things she told them days and weeks ago that she has no memory of telling them).

6107

Apparently a lot, but not sure about the instance discussed above.

https://www.gawker.com/media/dear-prudie-it-was-me-all-along

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6108

PFE’s protease inhibitor drug showed nearly 90% improvement (lower chance of hospitalization or worse) for mild covid in high risk patients .

The scheduled interim analysis showed an 89% reduction in risk of COVID-19-related hospitalization or death from any cause compared to placebo in patients treated within three days of symptom onset (primary endpoint); 0.8% of patients who received PAXLOVID™ were hospitalized through Day 28 following randomization (3/389 hospitalized with no deaths), compared to 7.0% of patients who received placebo and were hospitalized or died (27/385 hospitalized with 7 subsequent deaths). The statistical significance of these results was high (p<0.0001).

Similar reductions in COVID-19-related hospitalization or death were observed in patients treated within five days of symptom onset; 1.0% of patients who received PAXLOVID™ were hospitalized through Day 28 following randomization (6/607 hospitalized, with no deaths), compared to 6.7% of patients who received a placebo (41/612 hospitalized with 10 subsequent deaths), with high statistical significance (p<0.0001). In the overall study population through Day 28, no deaths were reported in patients who received PAXLOVID™ as compared to 10 (1.6%) deaths in patients who received placebo.

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6109

Is this the same pill that was previously mentioned, that was causing cell mutations in the people taking it? Or is this a different pill?

Is 400 and 600 test subjects considered large enough for the results to be reliable? Being hospitalized 28 days later seems like a pretty extended timeframe on which to base success?

And 7 and 10 deaths “from any cause” doesnt seem like a particularly significant number in absolute terms. I get that it’s compared to 0 in the other group, but I’d expect results to vary by 5-10 between groups of that size anyways?

6110

I think your concerns on the size, significance, etc are taken care of by the stats. They got a really high statistical significance level, but when you have 90% fewer hospitalizations you don’t need to be paid a fat Big Pharma check to notice something good is going on.

That was the Merck pill, which admittedly didn’t show those side effects in their trial but had shown them in animal models when tested previously.

I need to do some reading on the mechanism for this pill vs the other, but broadly I’m more optimistic on this PFE one.

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6111

While making a bat omelette, sometimes you have to break a few eggs. 4 years in jail for attempting to report on the pandemic.

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6112

Cult of Fauci tries to discredit his non-covid detractors.

So The Post , like most major media outlets, has been reporting on the successes of the White Coat Waste Project fairly and favorably for years. Most people in Washington and in the media regard success in bridging divisions between the citizenry and ideological camps as a desirable and positive objective, and few groups have done that with as much success as White Coat. And thus, along with trans-ideological public support, the group has been lavished with positive media coverage — until now.

Now everything has changed. The government official who oversees the agencies conducting most of these gruesome experiments has become a liberal icon and one of the most sacred and protected figures in modern American political history: Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and President Biden’s Chief Medical Advisor. Many of the most horrific experiments, including the ones on dogs and puppies now in the news as a result of White Coat’s activism, are conducted by agencies under Fauci’s command and are funded by budgets he controls.

In other words, White Coat’s activism, which had long generated bipartisan support and favorable media coverage, now reflects poorly on Dr. Fauci. And as a result, The Washington Post has decided to amass a team of reporters to attack the group — the same one the paper repeatedly praised prior to the COVID pandemic — in order to falsely smear it as a right-wing extremist group motivated not by a genuine concern for the welfare of animals or wasteful government spending, but rather due to a partisan desire, based in MAGA ideology, to attack Fauci.

For me, Greenwald’s article is more a commentary on the media bias around covid than anything else. I haven’t studied the group’s claims but don’t have any problem with animal use in science. I expected nothing less from the Washington Post but it’s still disappointing.

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6113

I saw an article in the news about PETA asking Fauci to resign because of some program that supposedly tested on dogs. The article was on a fox website, and contained a stock photo of an adorable beagle puppy, for obvious effect.

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6114

Pfizer data issues raised by a whistleblower working as part of the original vaccine trial. The director of operations raised these issues internally and also brought them to the FDAs attention. The former got them fired and the latter did nothing.

The journal that originally published the PFE vaccine data reviewed and verified the substantial materials provided and published this article on the issues raise.

  • Lack of timely follow-up of patients who experienced adverse events
  • Protocol deviations not being reported
  • Vaccines not being stored at proper temperatures
  • Mislabelled laboratory specimens, and
  • Targeting of Ventavia staff for reporting these types of problems.

Two former Ventavia employees spoke to The BMJ anonymously for fear of reprisal and loss of job prospects in the tightly knit research community. Both confirmed broad aspects of Jackson’s complaint. One said that she had worked on over four dozen clinical trials in her career, including many large trials, but had never experienced such a “helter skelter” work environment

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6115

Edit. I think this is going too far. Probably a large fraction of people over 67 have some of these problems like high blood pressure. That does not mean that the problem is going to kill them in the near future. But the article does show that the death statistics are not at all reliable

Italian Institute of Health Drastically Reduces Its Official COVID Death Toll Number

Changes defintiion of COVID death from ‘with COVID’ to ‘by COVID’.

The Italian Higher Institute of Health has drastically reduced the country’s official COVID death toll number by over 97 per cent after changing the definition of a fatality to someone who died from COVID rather than with COVID.

Italian newspaper Il Tempo reports that the Institute has revised downward the number of people who have died from COVID rather than with COVID from 130,000 to under 4,000.

“Yes, you read that right. Turns out 97.1% of deaths hitherto attributed to Covid were not due directly to Covid,” writes Toby Young.

Of the of the 130,468 deaths registered as official COVID deaths since the start of the pandemic, only 3,783 are directly attributable to the virus alone.

“All the other Italians who lost their lives had from between one and five pre-existing diseases. Of those aged over 67 who died, 7% had more than three co-morbidities, and 18% at least two,” writes Young.

“According to the Institute, 65.8% of Italians who died after being infected with Covid were ill with arterial hypertension (high blood pressure), 23.5% had dementia, 29.3% had diabetes, and 24.8% atrial fibrillation. Add to that, 17.4% had lung problems, 16.3% had had cancer in the last five years and 15.7% suffered from previous heart failures.”

The Institute’s new definition of a COVID death means that COVID has killed fewer people in Italy than (whisper it) the average bout of seasonal flu.

https://summit.news/2021/11/04/italian-institute-of-health-drastically-reduces-its-official-covid-death-toll-number/

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6116

It went so far, it ended up shoving its head up its own ass. Italy had ~100K more deaths in 2020 than in 2019, plus another ~25K in 2021 (vs 2019). And the excess mortality graphs for 2020 appear to track the COVID spikes. If a person was sick and died “with” COVID but probably would have lived if they didn’t get COVID, did they die “with” or “from” COVID?

If the excess mortality numbers are correct, then the COVID death statistics are pretty reliable for the countries I’ve checked (that’d be US and Italy as we discussed in this thread).

https://mpidr.shinyapps.io/stmortality/

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6117

maybe 2019 was a particularly low mortality year? Excess deaths is a tricky statistical concept. You need to make an estimate of what the normal number of deaths is and that’s usually done using a long term moving average. The problem is what period to do the average?

as I recall, that was a huge spike in the number of illegal entrants from African Muslim countries to Italy in the 19 teens. That could certainly distorted statistics

. And the excess mortality graphs for 2020 appear to track the COVID spikes.

if you are subtracting a constant, the 2019 deaths, then of course the variations will show the 2020 changes.

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6119

Check the graphs yourself. 2019 was pretty typical, slightly higher than 2018 but pretty similar to the average over the available data (about a decade).

They have the exact numbers for every month week of every year for over a decade, so you can compare to any one year OR to an average of multiple years.

Not a constant, but monthly weekly data. You can use 2019, 2018, 2017, etc.

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6120

Germany hits record covid cases, despite fairly high vaccination rates. Emphasis mine.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/germany-hits-record-covid-19-tally-as-pandemic-rebounds-across-europe-11636393589?page=1

Even so, Ger­many and some of its smaller Cen­tral and East­ern Eu­ropean neigh­bors stand out with a far steeper rise in in­fec-tions than neigh­bor­ing France, Italy and Spain. Ger­many reg­is-tered over 37,000 new cases on Fri­day, the high­est daily num­ber on record, ac­cord­ing to gov­ern-ment fig­ures, as the seven-day in­ci­dence of coro­n­avirus rose to over 200 in 100,000 peo­ple.

Over 67% of the Ger­man pop­u­la­tion have been fully vac­ci­nated, and ex­perts say this is help­ing to keep hos­pi­tal­iza­tions and deaths be­low their level dur­ing pre­vi­ous case surges. The seven-day rolling av­er­age of deaths linked to Covid-19 rose to 118 on Sun­day, much lower than the record 894 in Jan­uary but sig­nif­i­cantly more than the av­er­age in re­cent months.

The weak­en­ing of the pro­tec-tion af­forded by vac­cines also plays a role in ris­ing in­fec­tion fig­ures, ex­perts said. Around 26% of in­ten­sive-care pa­tients in­fected with Covid-19 have been fully vac­ci­nated, while that fig­ure rises to over 34% for pa­tients older than 60, ac­cord­ing to the Robert Koch In­sti­tute. The in­sti­tute said the so-called break­through in­fec­tions were by far most com­mon in those vac­ci­nated with JNJ.

Around 40% of peo­ple older than 60 had no neu­tral­iz­ing an­ti­bod­ies against the Delta vari­ant of coro­n­avirus six months af­ter be­com­ing fully vac­ci­nated, ac­cord­ing to Prof. Leif Erik Sander, a vac­cine ex­pert at the Char­ité Uni­ver­sity Clinic in Berlin.

Antibodies aren’t everything of course, but the lesson here is that the current Wuhan Classic based spike vaccines aren’t going to stop the spread of the Delta version of virus at all. It reproduces too fast and the vaccines aren’t targeted properly any more to stop it quickly before people become symptomatic and can spread it on.

Vaccines will help reduce harm to those who get it, but the right mental model for the vaccines I think is that they will reduce your risk of some given bad outcome by say 10-20x, but if you were at high risk before, you’re still at high risk, just lower, after getting the vaccine (assuming you’re a person who isn’t high risk because your immune system doesn’t work, in which case vaccines don’t help or not very much).

I still wonder why we don’t have trials for a Delta spike based vaccine. In the status quo, PFE gets to keep selling moderately effective vaccines and also a bunch of this new drug to every old person as soon as they get a could-be-covid sniffle.

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6121

Last night our school district suddenly voted to remove the mask requirements for all staff/students in district buildings.

They’re now following the “positivity rate” - the percentage of district staff.students who test positive - each week, and will return the mask requirement if the rolling 3-week average tops .5%. The current number is .22%, which is roughly one infection per elementary school building and 25 total infections district-wide.

I dont like the prospects of the rules changing week to week, but at least they’re doing it based on tangible, and relevant, data.

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