[conspire] When to get a covid test, brains, and a weird case, and a cardiology vs. immunology joke

[Deirdre Saoirse Moen]

First, something new! A common iodine solution (I used to use it when I lived in Ireland and got a cold and it tastes…fantastic…not.) Is virucidal aganst covid and kin. But it definitely is a throat saver if you're singing the next day.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40121-020-00316-3

Povidone-iodine (one brand name is Betadine) is readily available in drug stores.

On Wed, Aug 5, 2020, at 10:38 PM, Ruben Safir wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 05, 2020 at 10:22:17PM -0700, Deirdre Saoirse Moen wrote:
> > On Aug 5, 2020, at 10:14 PM, Ruben Safir <ruben at mrbrklyn.com> wrote:
> I don't deny anything.  This is not my first epidemenic and I've treated
> now THOUSANDS of COVID-19 patients and personally know a few hundred
> people who have had it.
> 
> They don't suffer brain damage... as a fact.

You're not a neuroscientist. Also, you can't state as fact your *opinion* about the state of people's brains in a country you've not visited in the last year about people whom you've never met.

Now, if you'd said, this is one study and it's not enough…fine. It's not a good sign, but it is not final evidence, I will grant. Is it conclusive of long-term damage? No. Three months is not long term. Does it look good? No.

As I said in reply to a layperson who asked if this study meant that the brain fog some people (including myself) were experiencing after covid was permanent:

Deep breath!

1. We don't know that these changes caused the brain fog that some experienced. (It may be a temporary change within the cells that haven't changed in a way that's readily perceivable on an MRI.)

2. We don't know how long it'll last. Yet.

3. Three months doesn't mean permanent. In some cases, given the LDH levels, it seems like there's still some inflammation (or whatever) going on. Maybe someone who understands what LDH really means can chime in. I've only skim-read the wiki page.

(end of my quoted comment)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lactate_dehydrogenase#Blood_test

LDH is elevated in meningitis and encephalitis, and in some DNA viral diseases like HIV (which becomes DNA once the retrovirus part is completed) and mononucleosis (aka Epstein-Barr, caused by HHV-4). There are also other reasons for it; I'm just listing the most common brain-related ones.

There have already been covid cases of encephalitis (note: my search was on ("cerebrospinal fluid"):
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32387508/
https://jnnp.bmj.com/content/91/8/846
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1201971220301958
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214751920303820
(etc.)

This article explains how acute toxic encephapathy happens in the context of covid:

https://reader.elsevier.com/reader/sd/pii/S0889159120303573

Interesting side note: coronaviruses are the largest known RNA viruses. 

> There is an issue with clotting and strokes and I know a few patients to
> have suffered stroke like symptoms and MIs.  Now, they are using clott
> blusters straight out in the ER, and that phenomenom has all but passed.

Actually, it hasn't, though it has improved. I mean, clearly, if it had "all but passed," so would the deaths. Which they have not.

> Everyone and there mother is trying to make bread now on COVID-19.
> 
> You should have been around for the HIV epidmenic.  They really knew how
> to party then... and everyone and there mother had a pet paper in there
> pocket with the latest wrinkle, often ending up killing the patient with
> radical therapies.

What makes you think I wasn't? I absolutely was reading science journals then. I remember all the back-and-forth about whether or not retroviruses could possibly exist in mammals. Granted, that's what caught my attention, so I didn't start reading until Gallo published in 1984. Gallo didn't get a Nobel partly because he was an utter asshat who tried to claim credit he was not due and didn't properly credit his co-authors and also tried to play keep-away with data that desperately needed to be shared with other researchers.

I started reading science journals because they were lying around the house. Granted, most were geophysics, given my father's line of work, and I did the software engineering leading to this paper sending a rocket into space to measure the helium line of the sun (lead author is my father):

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1029/JA083iA12p05685 (1978)

The radical therapies were unfortunately necessary and, well, we genuinely didn't know as much about the immune system then and HIV *infected immune system cells*. (Which, just for the record, SARS-CoV-2 also does, just not preferentially the way HIV does, apparently.)

So each and every therapy round was met with an, "Oh. Shit." because humans are more complex than lab mice/rats by more than an order of magnitude.

(The Atlantic article by Ed Yong is funny, and some of his tweets about the article that didn't make it into the article are also very funny.)

"The origin of this story is one of my colleagues asked for an immunity explainer, and I said, "GOD NO, have you any idea how complicated immunology is, that would kill me," but then I realized that I am already dead inside, and wrote the piece."

"Correction: This piece states that "Immunology confuses even biology professors who aren’t immunologists," but it also confuses biology professors who are immunologists. The Atlantic regrets the error."

> It takes more than a study to draw a conclusion and it takes YEARS to
> get those conclusions.. not weeks or days or even months.

But your belief/disbelief is not a factor.

On the other hand, what we do have? Similar studies from the survivors of SARS-CoV and MERS, and those *were* years ago.

> Meanwhile, they discovered this week that wearing a mask in an OR can
> reduce infection?!?  Who knew?!?

There were more studies done on masks in ORs recently, yes. They were far from the first.

Deirdre