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~*Official #COVID-19 Thread of Doom*~ Revenge of Omicron Prime

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SilentWorld

SilentWorld

Posted
Posted
1 hour ago, CitizenVectron said:

WHY THE FUCK WOULDN"T THEY ARRANGE APPOINTMENTS!?! Or, do what Israel is doing, and allow drive-thru vaccinations instead to minimize risk.

 

In the end I think that both the US and Canada are going to have more than enough doses to vaccinate the entire population by mid-summer...and both countries aren't going to be even close to being done, because the states/provinces are handling it instead of the federal governments.

 

WHY do we suck so much

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PaladinSolo

PaladinSolo

Posted
Posted
1 hour ago, CitizenVectron said:

WHY THE FUCK WOULDN"T THEY ARRANGE APPOINTMENTS!?! Or, do what Israel is doing, and allow drive-thru vaccinations instead to minimize risk.

 

In the end I think that both the US and Canada are going to have more than enough doses to vaccinate the entire population by mid-summer...and both countries aren't going to be even close to being done, because the states/provinces are handling it instead of the federal governments.

I mean in the US the states are already strapped for cash and stretched thin trying to just contain the virus while health departements aren't super well funded, and the "relief" bill didn't have any aid for state and local governments, its entirely the federal governments fault.

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b_m_b_m_b_m

b_m_b_m_b_m

Posted
Posted
1 minute ago, Spork3245 said:

 

LA Times isn't allowing me to read the article - cliffs or copy-pasta?

Quote

Dr. Megan Ranney has learned a lot about COVID-19 since she began treating patients with the disease in the emergency department in February.

But there’s one question she still can’t answer: What makes some patients so much sicker than others?

Advancing age and underlying medical problems explain only part of the phenomenon, said Ranney, who has seen patients of similar age, background and health status follow wildly different trajectories.

 

“Why does one 40-year-old get really sick and another one not even need to be admitted?” asked Ranney, an associate professor of emergency medicine at Brown University.

 

Provocative new research shows that in some cases, some people — men in particular — succumb because their immune systems are hit by friendly fire. Researchers hope the finding will help them develop targeted therapies for these patients.

 

In an international study published last month in the journal Science, 10% of nearly 1,000 COVID-19 patients who developed life-threatening pneumonia had antibodies that disable key immune system proteins called interferons.

 

These antibodies — known as autoantibodies because they attack the body itself — were not found in 663 people with mild or asymptomatic coronavirus infections. In fact, only four of 1,227 healthy individuals had the autoantibodies.

 

“This is one of the most important things we’ve learned about the immune system since the start of the pandemic,” said Dr. Eric Topol, executive vice president for research at Scripps Research in San Diego, who was not involved in the new study. “This is a breakthrough finding.”

In a second Science study, the same team of researchers found that an additional 3.5% of critically ill patients had mutations in genes that control the interferons involved in fighting viruses. Given that the body has 500 to 600 of these genes, it’s possible researchers will find more mutations, said Qian Zhang, lead author of the second study.

 

Interferons serve as the body’s first line of defense against infection, sounding the alarm and activating an army of virus-fighting genes, said virologist Angela Rasmussen, an associate research scientist at the Center of Infection and Immunity at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health.

 

“Interferons are like a fire alarm and a sprinkler system all in one,” said Rasmussen, who wasn’t involved in the new studies.

 

Lab studies show interferons are suppressed in some people with COVID-19, perhaps by the virus itself.

 

Interferons are particularly important for protecting the body against new viruses, said Zhang, a researcher at Rockefeller University’s St. Giles Laboratory of Human Genetics of Infectious Diseases.

When infected with the novel coronavirus, “your body should have alarms ringing everywhere,” she said. “If you don’t get the alarm out, you could have viruses everywhere in large numbers.”

Significantly, patients didn’t make autoantibodies in response to the virus. Instead, they appeared to have had them before the pandemic even began, said Paul Bastard, lead author of the first study who is also a researcher at Rockefeller University.

For reasons that researchers don’t understand, the autoantibodies never caused a problem until patients were infected with COVID-19, Bastard said. Somehow, the novel coronavirus, or the immune response it triggered, appears to have set them in motion.

 

“Before COVID, their condition was silent,” he said. “Most of them hadn’t gotten sick before.”

 

Scientists have long known that viruses and the immune system compete in a sort of arms race, with viruses evolving ways to evade the immune system and even suppress its response, said Sabra Klein, a professor of molecular microbiology and immunology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Antibodies are usually the heroes of the immune system, defending the body against viruses and other threats. But sometimes the immune system appears confused and creates autoantibodies. This occurs in autoimmune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis, when antibodies attack the joints, and Type 1 diabetes, in which the immune system attacks insulin-producing cells in the pancreas.

Although doctors don’t know the exact causes of autoimmune disease, they’ve observed that the conditions often occur after a viral infection.

In yet another unexpected finding from the first study, 94% of patients with these autoantibodies were men. About 12.5% of men with life-threatening COVID-19 pneumonia had autoantibodies against interferons, compared with 2.6% of women. That was unexpected, given that autoimmune disease is far more common in women, Klein said.

 

“I’ve been studying sex differences in viral infections for 22 years, and I don’t think anybody who studies autoantibodies thought this would be a risk factor for COVID-19,” she said.

 

The study might help explain why men are more likely than women to become critically ill with COVID-19 and die, Klein said.

“You see significantly more men dying in their 30s, not just in their 80s,” she said

Akiko Iwasaki, a professor of immunobiology at the Yale School of Medicine, noted that several genes involved in the immune system’s response to viruses are on the X chromosome.

 

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Women have two copies of this chromosome — along with two copies of each gene it contains. That gives women a backup in case one copy of a gene becomes defective, Iwasaki said.

 

Men, however, have only one copy of the X chromosome. So if there is a defect or harmful gene on the X chromosome, they have no other copy of that gene to correct the problem, Iwasaki said.

 

Bastard noted that one woman in the study who developed autoantibodies has a rare genetic condition in which she has only one X chromosome.

 

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Scientists have struggled to explain why men have a higher risk of hospitalization and death from COVID-19. When the disease first appeared in China, experts speculated that men suffered more from the virus because they are much more likely to smoke than Chinese women.

 

Researchers quickly noticed that men in Spain were also more likely to die of COVID-19, however, even though men and women there smoke at about the same rate, Klein said.

 

But behavioral differences between men and women provide only part of the answer. Scientists say it’s possible that the hormone estrogen may somehow protect women, while testosterone may put men at greater risk. Interestingly, recent studies have found that obesity poses a much greater risk to men with COVID-19 than to women, Klein said.

 

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To be sure, scientists say that the new research solves only part of the mystery of why patient outcomes can vary so greatlyScreening patients for autoantibodies against interferons could help predict which patients are more likely to become very sick, Bastard said. Testing takes about two days.

 

“I think we should give the test to everyone who is admitted,” he sai

 

Bastard said he hopes his findings will lead to new therapies that save lives. He notes that the body manufactures many types of interferons, and giving patients a different type that isn’t disabled by their genes or autoantibodies might help them fight off the viru

 

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A pilot study of 98 patients published Thursday in the journal Lancet Respiratory Medicine found benefits from an inhaled form of interferon. In the industry-funded study, hospitalized COVID-19 patients randomly assigned to receive interferon beta-1a were more than twice as likely as others to recover enough to resume their regular activitie

 

Researchers need to confirm these findings in a much larger study, said Dr. Nathan Peiffer-Smadja, a researcher at Imperial College London who was not involved in the research but wrote an accompanying editorial. Future work should test patients’ blood for genetic mutations and autoantibodies against interferon to see if they respond differently than other

 

Around the world, scientists have launched more than 100 clinical trials of interferons. Until larger studies are completed, doctors say, Bastard’s findings are unlikely to change how they treat COVID-1

 

ADVERTISEME

 

Dr. Lewis Kaplan, president of the Society of Critical Care Medicine, said he treats patients according to their symptoms, not their risk factor

 

“If you are a little sick, you get treated with a little bit of care,” Kaplan said. “You are really sick, you get a lot of care. But if a COVID patient comes in with hypertension, diabetes and obesity, we don’t say, ‘They have risk factors. Let’s put them in the ICU.

 

Liz Szabo writes for Kaiser Health News (KHN), a nonprofit news service covering health issues. It is an editorially independent program of the Kaiser Family Foundation that is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.’”s.NT9.s.s.NTs.d.

 

 

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Jason

Jason

Posted
Posted
7 minutes ago, Spork3245 said:

LA Times isn't allowing me to read the article - cliffs or copy-pasta?

 

You lose some images but Firefox reader mode gets around their paywall, it's just a javascript overlay.

 

I think completely disabling javascript would also work.

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CitizenVectron

CitizenVectron

Posted
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virus-outbreak_wide-f51694865979efe9c88a

'Toxic Individualism': Pandemic Politics Driving Health Care Workers From Small Towns

WWW.NPR.ORG
A wave of departing medical professionals in rural areas threatens to leave gaping holes in these health care systems and local economies, triggering a death spiral that may be hard to stop.

 

Quote

More than a quarter of all the public health administrators in Kansas quit, retired or got fired this year, according to Vicki Collie-Akers, an associate professor of population health at the University of Kansas. Some of them got death threats. Some had to hire armed guards.

 

Quote

The virus infecting thousands of Americans a day is also attacking the country's social fabric. The coronavirus has exposed a weakness in many rural communities, where divisive pandemic politics are alienating some of their most critical residents — health care workers.

 

"It's heartbreaking," Darnauer says. "Because we say, this is what we value. And then when we actually had the chance to walk it out, we did it really poorly."

 

The pushback was too much. Darnauer resigned her position as Rice County medical director in July. Some friends reached out to support her, and her bonds with other local health care professionals strengthened, but she felt disrespected and betrayed by the ascendant anti-mask portion of the community. Darnauer says the pandemic has exposed a rift that won't be forgotten.

 

Crazy how partisanship is literally driving essential healthcare workers out of rural communities. In 5 years: "Well just because I thought they were part of the deep state to spread the Gates microchips, that didn't mean my husband had to die of his diabeetus when they closed down the three clinics nearby!"

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CayceG

CayceG

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hospital-2.jpg?w=1280

Henry County Medical Center reaches capacity caring for COVID-19 patients

WWW.WKRN.COM
Henry County Medical Center directors say the hospital is out of critical care beds, its COVID-19 unit is full, and all of its ventilators are in use.

 

This is my hometown. 

 

 

Quote

“As far as our critical care beds, they’re full. All of our COVID unit is full. We had all six ventilators in use, Bell said.

 

 

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Chairslinger

Chairslinger

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Posted
8 minutes ago, PaladinSolo said:

After hearing today the us hasn't been tracking the virus' evolution cause we're fucking stupid I wouldn't be surprised if the new variants found in the UK and South Africa originated here lol. 

 

 

So true.

 

Whenever someone calls it the China Virus I suggest calling it the America Virus. Because it may have started spreading in China, but we're the ones who really perfected it.

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Jason

Jason

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If there's photographic evidence of you doing shit like this they should just put you directly into the refrigeration truck and lock the doors if you show up at the hospital with COVID. You can get let out of the truck if you're still alive after 14 days.

 

fill-1200x650

Queens Man Who Attended "COVID Conga Line" Party Hospitalized With COVID

GOTHAMIST.COM
One party guest told Gothamist that even if he'd known his fellow Republican attendees were infected with the virus, he still would have gone to the party without a mask.

 

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