Studies corner

[Branster]

There are so many snippets of information regarding small tests, case studies and even research from all over the world, some interesting, some surprising, some hopeful. Too many and too small or sometimes obscure to make the main news

If you’d like to share you are welcome to join the thread.

I’ll make a start with these findings from Canada about a potential inhibitor drug

www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/04/200402144526.htm

CIDRAP: COVID scenarios

Possible COVID wave forms

www.cidrap.umn.edu/sites/default/files/public/downloads/cidrap-covid19-viewpoint-part1.pdf

www.gov.uk/government/news/review-into-factors-impacting-health-outcomes-from-covid-19

“ Thousands of existing health records for people who have had COVID-19 are to be examined as part of a major exercise to establish more robust data on the factors impacting the number of cases and health outcomes for different groups within the population.

The exercise is part of a rapid review being led by Public Health England (PHE) to better understand how different factors such as ethnicity, deprivation, age, gender and obesity could impact on how people are affected by COVID-19.”

Update on the German study looking at the infection rates in a known hot spot.
There is a link to the full preprint at the bottom.
www.uni-bonn.de/news/111-2020

Week 7 of this programme today seems to be showing the front line research around if it did arrive earlier than thought in the U.K.

www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000h5l1

Indian study out today, 176 covid 19 patients (previously checked serum levels).

Same findings as the New Orleans, Indonesian and Philippines studies:

100% of critical patients less than 75 years old had Vitamin D insufficiency

papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3593258

file:///C:/Users/User/Downloads/SSRN-id3593258.pdf

It's piling up .
When will someone take notice? The NHS website still says there is no evidence of a connection.

5th Vit D3 study from Belgium.

Males showed markedly higher percentage of vitamin D deficiency ..Vit D deficiency is a possible risk factor for severe infection in males. Vit D3 supplementation might be an inexpensive, accessible and safe mitigation for covid

Link :
www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.01.20079376v1

another study on vitamin D - small but the first intervention study I've seen www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31531088

@alreadytaken

I missed that Iranian ventilation study - the other five focus on blood serum levels.

Stand out text from the Iranian study:
''Another interesting finding of current study was effect of high dose vitamin D on all-cause mortality of the patients. Our results revealed that the number of survived patients was significantly higher in the intervention group than in the control. Therefore, high-dose vitamin D injections can increase the survival rate of the patients.

The adequate vitamin D levels are necessary to regulate the function of the immune system, and its deficiency leads to an impairment of immune function. This could led to increased risk of infections, particularly ventilator-associated pneumonia, systemic inflammation, and multiple organ dysfunction syndromes which could increase mortality rate and length of ICU stay.''

it's only fair to say that the study is not on Covid-19 patients and that at least one retrospective study found no impact. However it's not clear what dose of vitamin D was used in the retrospective study and another study study suggests dose is significant. www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4939707/

Blood serum studies can only suggest the need for intervention studies, supplements dont always work especially when you need adequate magnesium levels to benefit from extra vitamin D.

Personally I'm sitting out in the sun when possible and eating the odd square of dark chocolate, one way to get extra magnesium.

viral loads at different ages - not time for hildren to hug grandparents zoonosen.charite.de/fileadmin/user_upload/microsites/m_cc05/virologie-ccm/dateien_upload/Weitere_Dateien/analysis-of-SARS-CoV-2-viral-load-by-patient-age.pdf

These studies have increased my awareness of Vit D importance, especially atm

So many thanks to all, especially LWJ70

Personally, I've boosted my intake of salmon or mackerel to 3-4 days per week, with a tbsp fish oil the other days
and I take Vit D3, C, plus Mg, K, Zinc, Ca after my main meal.

I also take a 1-2 hour daily Rhine walk - been sunny here for most of the last 6 weeks

Experts' answers to questions about COVID-19 and viral load

Includes this info:

https://www.sciencemediacentre.org/expert-reaction-to-questions-about-covid-19-and-viral-load/

Professor Willem van Schaik, Professor in Microbiology and Infection at the University of Birmingham, said:

“The minimal infective dose is defined as the lowest number of viral particles that cause an infection in 50% of individuals (or ‘the average person’).

For many bacterial and viral pathogens we have a general idea of the minimal infective dose
but because SARS-CoV-2 is a new pathogen we lack data.

For SARS, the infective dose in mouse models was only a few hundred viral particles.
It thus seems likely that we need to breathe in something like a few hundred or thousands of SARS-CoV-2 particles to develop symptoms.

This would be a relatively low infective dose and could explain why the virus is spreading relatively efficiently.

warning about children www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)31094-1/fulltext

The sixth blood serum vitamin D study was published two days ago - from covid patients in Switzerland. Similar conclusions to the previous five:

All covid 19 patients were deficient in vitamin D.

The study checked the averages from the year before and checked the average of 1377 random individuals.

The covid positive patients had an average of 9.3 ng/mL whilst the negative patients had an average of 24.6 ng/mL. The average of the random individuals was also 24.6

There was a small but interesting point in there. The researchers were wandering why the patients who tested negative (who had higher levels of vit D) had become infected with other respiratory viruses and not covid 19. Maybe covid 19 has a much smaller chance of infecting individuals with normal vit D levels compared to other viruses?

Link here:
www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/12/5/1359/htm

OpenSAFELY: factors associated with COVID-19-related hospital death in the linked electronic health records of 17 million adult NHS patients

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.06.20092999v1.full.pdf+html

"We have demonstrated -for the first time -that

only a small part of the substantially increased risks of death from COVID-19 among non-white groups and among people living in more deprived areas can be attributed to existing disease.

blood pressure medication not associated with increased risk of serious illness www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/NEJMoa2008975

Study of 16k patients in UK

www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.23.20076042v1

Antibody testing & reliability

Studies could be seriously skewed, unless within a population with a high % infected

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/10/can-antibody-testing-deliver-on-promises-to-lift-the-lockdown

For a test to be usable, the specificity should be close to 100%.

If, for example, 5% of the population have had Covid-19,
a test with only 90% specificity would mistakenly assess 95 people in a sample of 1000 individuals as having had the virus,

ie nearly 70% of the positive results would be false.
........
Immunity to pathogens is a spectrum ranging from
the varicella-zoster virus (which causes chicken pox) – against which antibodies confer lifelong protection –
to HIV, where infected individuals produce large amounts of non-neutralising antibodies that do nothing to clear the disease.
....
“The expectation is that there’s at least partial, short-term immunity,
but we don’t know that for sure and
we don’t know if mildly infected patients have any form of immunity,”
says Theel. (Mayo Climic, USA)

“For people that have had a short disease duration, it could be that their body killed off the virus quickly before there was time to mount an antibody response.”

whatsnext2 A poster on another thread some days ago was quoting 33% of hospital admissions dying and being hammered for "scare-mongering"

Thanks you; now I see where the 33% came from
Even with median age 72, it's sobering for 16,749 patients, 47% with no comorbidities

ScienceMagazine https://bit.ly/2zzLKJX

Abstract

France has been heavily affected by the SARS-CoV-2 epidemic and went into lockdown on the 17 March 2020.
Using models applied to hospital and death data, we estimate the impact of the lockdown and current population immunity.

We find 3.6% of infected individuals are hospitalized and 0.7% die,
ranging from 0.001% in those 80ya.
.....
The lockdown reduced the reproductive number from 2.90 to 0.67 (77% reduction)

By 11 May 2020, when interventions are scheduled to be eased,
we project 2.8 million (range: 1.8–4.7) people,
or 4.4% (range: 2.8–7.2) of the population, will have been infected.

Population immunity appears insufficient to avoid a second wave if all control measures are released at the end of the lockdown.

.

33% of hospital admissions had died but 17% had yet to have an outcome. The longer you are on a ventilator the harder it is to come off it and the more likely you are to die. I hope some of those still in hospital were not being ventilated and were just slow to recover but the chances are that 33% would go up and possibly near 50%. However if you went in now your chances might be a lot better as treatments are probably already improving.

summary of research about children

www.rcpch.ac.uk/resources/covid-19-research-evidence-summaries

Measuring excess mortality: the case of England during the Covid-19 Pandemic
INET Oxford Working Paper No. 2020-11

https://www.inet.ox.ac.uk/files/6-May-20-Muellbauer-Aron-Excess-mortality-in-England-vs.-Europe-and-the-COVID-pandemic.pdf

EuroMOMO produces the most systematic comparative tracking of excess mortality in Europe.

Of the 24 countries or regions covered, England had the highest peak weekly excess mortality in total,
and also for the most vulnerable age group (the over-65s),
and, strikingly, for the 15-64 age group.

For the last group, which should be less at risk,
the relative record for England is nearly 3 times worse than the next worst- ranked country, Spain
(German data suggest mortality well within the normal range).
......
Generally, there was a collective failure in preparedness across the public health system,
especially for testing capability and adequate supplies and distribution logistics of personal protection equipment for health workers.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/may/17/how-england-found-itself-at-the-foot-of-the-covid-19-league-table

At its peak it was 2.8 times worse than the weekly peak in the next worst country, Spain,
around four times worse than France and Belgium,
and more than five times worse than in Italy.