[AR] Re: ... Coronavirus
- From: Norman Yarvin <yarvin@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 23 Mar 2020 19:32:01 -0400
On Mon, Mar 23, 2020 at 12:37:48PM -0700, Henry Vanderbilt wrote:
On 3/21/2020 1:26 PM, Henry Spencer wrote:
On Sat, 21 Mar 2020, Norman Yarvin wrote:
There's nothing set in stone about the length of time to field a
vaccine. The often-quoted 18 months (or "at least a year") assumes
the usual approval process: Phase 1 trial, then Phase 2 trial, then
Phase 3 trial -- all hurried up, but still basically business as
usual. Really we could put a lot of candidate vaccines out there as
soon as they could be fielded (starting basically now; at least one
is already in a Phase 1 trial), and collect statistics on their
safety and efficacy as we went.
And if your prototype vaccine turned out to kill more people than the
virus? That is unfortunately *not* an unrealistic possibility.
What he said. One word: Thalidomide. Don't look for widely-distributed
vaccine in less than a year, and most likely longer than that.
So we should wait for the Chinese to develop and test the vaccine
first and find any problems, like we did with the Europeans and
thalidomide? (Pretty much all the 'flipper babies' were European;
score one for FDA bureaucratic delay.)
That'd likely work (the Chinese can be quite competent medically, are
often realistic about their cost-benefit calculations, and sure can
act fast), but the cost of delay is rather different: thalidomide was
sold as a morning sickness treatment, which was never a matter of dire
urgency.
FWIW, YMMV, I took a dose of zinc, zinc gluconate 50 mg (about 7 mg
actual zinc) right after I first noticed mild shortness of breath/spO2
92% yesterday evening. (Previous bottom extreme of my normal range was
93%, when I was being particularly sessile.) Also bit off a few mg more
and let it dissolve between cheek and gum, renewing as needed since (my
usual cold-reduction dose.) Theory being common colds are often also
small-c coronaviruses, and zinc is proven to reduce cold duration and
severity. (Been taking it for that for years, it just works.)
For oxygen saturation, 92% is a pretty low number; the Zhejiang
University Hospital COVID-19 handbook classifies anyone with less than
93% oxygen saturation as a "severe case" (not "mild" or "moderate",
but less than "critical"), who should be in the hospital and on
high-flow oxygen.
But the coronavirus doesn't give the usual symptoms of "a mildly
annoying generic respiratory bug": the ACE2 enzyme that it latches
on to is expressed in the lungs and not in the mouth or nose. So it
mostly infects the lungs, sparing the upper respiratory system. Also
one normally gets fever with it. So if it seems like a "generic
respiratory bug" it probably is.
With the coronavirus and zinc, the problem would be getting enough
zinc into the lungs. It's easy to bathe the nose and mouth in a high
concentration of zinc: you don't even need to (and indeed shouldn't)
apply it to the nose, but can just let the zinc ions migrate up there
by themselves. There is (I swear I am not making this up) a small
potential difference, usually about 60 to 120 millivolts, between the
nose and the mouth that drags positive ions from the mouth to the
nose. (I had to grab a multimeter and measure it in myself before I
believed it.)
Anyway, moving a lozenge around in your mouth, you can get a far
higher concentration of zinc than you can by swallowing it and letting
the body absorb it and transport it to the mouth: zinc is an essential
nutrient, but the body controls its absorption and stops when it's
gotten enough for its own needs. So getting a high concentration of
it into the lungs would be a problem.
Now there is one well-known way of getting zinc into the lungs: weld
some galvanized steel without wearing sufficient respiratory
protection, and give yourself the "zinc flu". But that is most
definitely not medical advice! (I mean, if anyone is crazy enough to
try it on the coronavirus, by all means let us know what the results
are, but it's definitely not something that is safe to try.)
My experience too is that zinc lozenges work against colds. A lot of
studies on using them against colds have come out negative, but that
seems to be because they did it wrong: it's free zinc ions that are
effective, and free zinc ions give a "metallic taste" which is
somewhat unpleasant. Most commercial zinc lozenges have some
ingredient that binds the zinc (such as citrate), which both makes
them more pleasant and ruins their effectiveness. And the zinc has to
be in a form that dissociates well in the first place: gluconate is
good, but acetate is better. (Combining either with a citrate still
ruins them.) But when you do get it right, the zinc has a direct
antiviral action against many cold viruses, as well as being something
of an astringent:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19906491
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