zulumoose wrote:Or maybe he was already feverish, and the woman had nothing to do with it. The woman may have had a chronic cough for ages, and thought nothing of it, hence the insensitivity, everything is speculation.

Can an Old Vaccine Stop the New Coronavirus?
A tuberculosis vaccine invented a century ago is cheap and safe, and seems to bolster the body’s immune system.

snip ...."That a biomedical powerhouse like the U.S. should so thoroughly fail to create a very simple diagnostic test was, quite literally, unimaginable. “I’m not aware of any simulations that I or others have run where we [considered] a failure of testing,” says Alexandra Phelan of Georgetown University, who works on legal and policy issues related to infectious diseases."
ouch ..."Partly, that’s because the White House is a ghost town of scientific expertise"

Svartalf wrote:Macdoc, your first article feels like woo to me, it is established that some antibacterial drugs also have antiviral properties, but a vaccine boosting you immunity to a bacteria would likely offer no protection against any viral disease.

On Monday, scientists in Melbourne, Australia, started administering the B.C.G. vaccine or a placebo to thousands of physicians, nurses, respiratory therapists and other health care workers — the first of several randomized controlled trials intended to test the vaccine’s effectiveness against the coronavirus.

“Nobody is saying this is a panacea,” said Nigel Curtis, an infectious diseases researcher at the University of Melbourne and Murdoch Children’s Research Institute, who planned the trial. “What we want to do is reduce the time an infected health care worker is unwell, so they recover and can come back to work faster.”

A clinical trial of 1,000 health care workers began 10 days ago in the Netherlands, said Dr. Mihai G. Netea, an infectious disease specialist at Radboud University Medical Center in Nijmegen. Eight hundred health care workers have already signed up. (As in Australia, half of the participants will receive a placebo.)

kiore wrote:

Svartalf wrote:Macdoc, your first article feels like woo to me, it is established that some antibacterial drugs also have antiviral properties, but a vaccine boosting you immunity to a bacteria would likely offer no protection against any viral disease.

The BCG has been shown to provoke the immune system generally, whether this will have a significant effect on this corona virus is unclear beyond what the hygiene hypothesis would already indicate. Places where people get BCGs are also where they would tell to have other things provoking general immune responses.

Novartis and Incyte are planning to launch a clinical study to test the potential of Jakavi (ruxolitinib) in patients with COVID-19 associated cytokine storm, a type of severe immune overreaction that can result from the infection and may contribute to respiratory compromise in some patients.

According to the Swiss drugmaker, preclinical and preliminary clinical evidence suggests that the JAK inhibitor could reduce the number of patients requiring intensive care and mechanical ventilation.

The proposed trial will assess Jakavi in combination with standard of care (SoC) therapy, compared to SoC therapy alone, in patients with severe COVID-19 pneumonia as a result of SARS-CoV-2 infection.

Our intent is to build on emerging evidence from independent studies to further establish the role ruxolitinib could play in balancing immune response to the infection and therefore potentially improving outcomes of patients with COVID-19 associated cytokine storm,” Steven Stein, MD, chief medical officer, Incyte, said in a statement. “We recognize the significant and urgent medical need of patients with severe COVID-19 infection, and we are working with the FDA in an effort to rapidly advance the RUXCOVID and EAP studies.”

In a letter in The Lancet, Puja Mehta, MD, and colleagues wrote that a subgroup of patients with severe COVID-19 may have cytokine storm syndrome that resembles secondary hamophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis, a hyperinflammatory syndrome. Characteristics of this cytokine storm profile in patients with severe COVID-19 include: increased interleukin (IL)-2, IL-7, granulocyte-colony stimulating factor, interferon-γ inducible protein 10, monocyte chemoattractant protein 1, macrophage inflammatory protein 1-α, and tumor necrosis factor-α.2

Macdoc wrote:Activating the immune system to its full potential is a very active field. In Covid - there is some evidence that an overactive immune response is killing people ...a cytokine storm.

Coronavirus: Tiger at Bronx Zoo tests positive for Covid-19

A four-year-old female Malayan tiger at the Bronx Zoo has tested positive for the coronavirus.

The tiger, named Nadia, is believed to be the first known case of an animal infected by a human with Covid-19.

The Bronx Zoo, in New York City, says the test result was confirmed by the National Veterinary Services Laboratory in Iowa.

Nadia, along with six other big cats, is thought to have been infected by an asymptomatic zoo keeper.

(Continues)

Macdoc wrote:Perhaps take your "woo" concerns to these people Svartalf

On Monday, scientists in Melbourne, Australia, started administering the B.C.G. vaccine or a placebo to thousands of physicians, nurses, respiratory therapists and other health care workers — the first of several randomized controlled trials intended to test the vaccine’s effectiveness against the coronavirus.

“Nobody is saying this is a panacea,” said Nigel Curtis, an infectious diseases researcher at the University of Melbourne and Murdoch Children’s Research Institute, who planned the trial. “What we want to do is reduce the time an infected health care worker is unwell, so they recover and can come back to work faster.”

A clinical trial of 1,000 health care workers began 10 days ago in the Netherlands, said Dr. Mihai G. Netea, an infectious disease specialist at Radboud University Medical Center in Nijmegen. Eight hundred health care workers have already signed up. (As in Australia, half of the participants will receive a placebo.)

Partner who is a clinical research nurse is well aware of the vaccine and has had B.C.G. vaccine herself. She is unsure whether it is a sustained protection as it was a while ago.
But you are of course welcome to your poorly supported opinion.

Trial drug can significantly block early stages of COVID-19 in engineered human tissues
Date:
April 2, 2020
Source:
University of British Columbia
Summary:
An international team has found a trial drug that effectively blocks the cellular door SARS-CoV-2 uses to infect its hosts.

Keep It Real wrote:It would be/have been fair in my opinion to call this outbreak "SARS2" and that might have scared people more effectively from the outset so they social distanced correctly. The virus' official name is, afterall: severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), as opposed to "SARS" which was called severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SARS_(disambiguation)

My second point on this is to raise the question of whether or not SARS2 is any more virulent than SARS, at least in terms of how transmittable it is. This graph shows that there has been a 10 fold increase in air travel out of China since the time of the 2003 SARS epidemic (NOT pandemic). There has doubtless been a large increase in air travel globally in general too over that period. One reason Italy has it so bad is due to skiing season, it has been suggested, for example, and for a time Switzerland had the highest per capita infection rate in the world too. As if global warming weren't enough of a reason to stop doing an impression of the demise of Icarus, now we have SARS2/3/n.

Thommo wrote:Some care might need to be taken about the terms "mortality rate" and "case fatality rate" and what those actually mean.

The most obvious principle differences between SARS and SARS-CoV-2 might be the lab tested differences found in their genome.