[conspire] COVID at the end of 2021

[Deirdre Saoirse Moen]

On Fri, Dec 31, 2021, at 11:50 PM, Rick Moen wrote:
>   The mean viral shedding for unvaccinated individuals is 8.9 days with
>   a standard deviation of 10 days. This is where the 10 day quarantine
>   came from. Yes, you read that right, while most will no longer be
>   infectious, many are still shedding long after, but they had to put the
>   line somewhere. For vaccinated individuals the mean length of viral
>   shedding is 2.7 days with a standard deviation of 3. This is just one of
>   the many benefits of vaccination. 

In fairness, when the quarantine was initially proposed, they didn't realize the extreme long tail. This whole debacle has been a compromise between estimated political will and reality.

> 4. "That's nice, but what should I do for myself, my family, my friends?"

tl;dr: if you do get exposed, consider taking an H1 histamine blocker (e.g., loratadine) and H2 histamine blocker (e.g., famotidine) after you suspect you were exposed.

I'm on my second book (this one a Springer, fka Springer Verlag, one) about mast cells, partly because we didn't learn a lot about them in immunology.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mast_cell

They're technically white blood cells (granulocytes, part of the innate immune system), but are so general purpose that they're no longer considered "just" immune cells. They're bags of histamine and heparin and send out 1000 chemical mediators like some overamped dope dealer. They have histamine receptors all over. Allergy attacks? Mast cells. Diabetes complications? Mast cells. Congestive heart failure complications? Mast cells.

Part of the reason their roles aren't very well understood: some of those mediators only exist for fractions of a second, so getting a measurement is nearly impossible.

I mention this because I got to reading about them after running into them in one too many papers about severe Covid.

The first book I read was by Dr. Lawrence B. Afrin, titled *Never Bet Against Occam* (essentially, patients coming in with a laundry list of diagnoses wound up having one hydra-like underlying condition: mast cell activation disorder). It's a set of case histories like a ginormous series of House MD episodes.

After experimentation, he found that histamine blockers calmed them down, and relieved a lot of non-obvious weird symptoms.

Case in point: I decided to start taking the H1 and H2 blockers regularly after reading the book, and…my chronic headaches stopped being 7 out of 10 on the pain scale every day and are now more like 3 out of 10. I have zero clue why, but I'll take it.

Many of the mediators from mast cells are implicated in some of the extreme badness of Covid (e.g., ARDS, thrombocytopenia, etc.), so it's at least arguable that you can prevent some of that hyperinflammation by starting early with antihistamines (assuming you can tolerate them).

Deirdre