hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr3137.txt

Episode: 3137
Title: HPR3137: Coronavirus Update 2020-07-30
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3137/hpr3137.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 17:36:32

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3137 for Tuesday 11 August 2020. Today's show is entitled,
Coronavirus Update 30 July 2020,
and as part of the series, Health and Health Care, it is hosted by Ahuka
and is about 23 minutes long, and carries a clean flag. The summary is
where we are with this pandemic. And how should we respond?
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Hello, this is Ahuka,
welcoming you to Hacker Public Radio in another exciting episode.
And what I want to do today is do an update.
It's been a little while since I talked about what's going on with coronavirus.
In fact, almost three months since the last one I did,
that's okay because things tend to move slowly where this disease is concerned,
although it may feel like everything's happening quickly.
Right now, the status, we are far from beating it.
There's a lot we don't know.
But there are a few things that are coming into focus now,
so I think it's a good time for another update.
And it's worth noting that I am in the United States,
specifically, Southeastern Michigan,
so much of what I'm seeing is specific to that country.
But the medical work is broader than that.
So there are three broad categories to deal with in this update,
the first being prevention, the second treatment,
and the third immunization.
I'll take them in that order since they are in the order in which they can be used to help us.
And I will add some resources at the end if you want to stay up to date on reliable information.
There's a lot of misinformation going around,
and that's one of the reasons I periodically like to give you these updates.
So prevention is mostly common sense.
I went to the site for the CDC, Center for Disease Control,
and from that, I got these common sense recommendations.
What are they saying?
Wash your hands often,
avoid touching your face and most importantly your eyes.
Avoid close contact,
avoid close contact,
minimum six feet, both indoors and outdoors.
Cover your mouth and nose with a cloth face cover when around others.
Cover coughs and sneezes.
I kind of hope everyone does this anyway.
When I worked at the hospital,
we were told to sneeze into your elbow if you had on a long sleeve shirt or jacket,
since germs would not last long on the fabric.
If you sneezed into your hands and then touched anyone like shaking hands
or touched a surface,
you'd only spread the germs.
So if you see someone sneezing into their elbow,
it's not odd behavior,
it's in fact extremely intelligent behavior.
Next, clean and disinfect.
You know, soap is the best way to kill the virus.
Washing for 20 seconds with soap should do the trick.
The reason why soap is so effective is that the virus membrane is made up of fats.
And soap is something that dissolves fats.
That's the whole point.
So, in fact, that's better.
I mean, right now,
I'm seeing that there are reports that some of the hand sanitizers may have
as their alcohol methanol rather than ethanol.
Now, ethanol is the stuff that is safe,
as safe as anything can be to drink.
Personally, I avoid it.
Methanol, though, is definitely a killer.
And there's evidence that it can be absorbed into the skin
through hand sanitizer.
And so some hand sanitizers are being pulled off the market.
Basically, you know, plain old soap is the best thing out there.
Monitor your health daily, right?
There are certain basic signs.
You know, you got fever.
You've got to dry cough, you know, things like this.
And, you know, if you have any questions, get yourself tested.
And if you have any of the symptoms,
the first thing you do is you quarantine yourself.
Now, none of these are radical.
It's just common sense that the best way to avoid problems
is to not get sick in the first place.
Unfortunately, in the United States,
this has become extremely polarized,
and people are expressing their political sentiments
by refusing to wear masks and downplaying the dangers,
even as the deaths in the United States
cross the 150,000 mark.
But even if other people are stupid, you don't have to be.
And this is a serious illness.
We know it attacks not just the respiratory system,
but other organs, including the heart.
There is a recent study reported in the Journal
of the American Medical Association cardiology.
So, JAMA cardiology is the short name for the journal.
And I've got a link in the show notes,
and this is as good a time as any.
I'm going to be mentioning a lot of things in this update.
And I put links to all of them in the show notes.
There's a lot of links there.
Please make use of them.
So, anyway, this study was something called a cohort study.
And a cohort study means you're matching,
it's not purely random, you're matching people
in the test group and the study group to be similar.
So, this was a study of a hundred adults
who had recovered from COVID-19
and matched them with another similar group,
about a hundred adults who never got the disease.
And did MRI scans of their hearts?
In the recovered group, they found 78 patients
showed structural changes to their hearts.
76 had evidence of a biomarker signaling cardiac injury
typically found after a heart attack
and 60 had signs of inflammation.
We also know the virus causes clotting problems
and that increases the risk of stroke.
So, if you think you'll just get it and then get over it,
you are being seriously stupid.
This is a very serious disease.
And it needs to be taken seriously.
So, testing.
A key measure for prevention is testing.
And the good news is that an inexpensive quick saliva test
is, you know, we're developing these quick tests.
And that's good because the test we have right now,
you know, does involve putting a swab up your nose
and it's not exactly fun.
Better than dying, but, you know, not fun.
But a quick saliva test would be wonderful.
Now, why is this important?
It's important if you use the information.
Testing for the sake of testing doesn't do a damn thing.
So, the idea is that when you find someone who tests positive,
you quarantine them.
And then you go through their list of contacts
to do further testing.
Test everyone they came into contact with.
And then if any of those people test positive, you quarantine them.
And then you start working on their contacts and so on.
Now, this does work.
It's how a very similar related virus called SARS was defeated.
Do you remember SARS?
SARS virus killed a total of 774 people worldwide,
solely because testing, tracing, and quarantining were effectively used.
And I said, in the United States, we're already over 150,000 people dead.
And that's not even the end of the story.
The second most populous country in the world, India.
India will be the most populous in another decade or two.
But right now, they're second to China.
And their rates of infection are shooting up very, very rapidly.
Well, we're a long way from being out of the woods on this one, folks.
Now, testing, tracing, quarantining, perfectly good strategy.
There's reason to doubt this would work well in the US now.
And the reason is this whole thing has been so highly politicized and polarized
that there are some people refusing the simple act of wearing a mask
because it's going to demonstrate their political allegiance or something.
In addition, the United States is again running short of testing supplies,
causing delays of anywhere from days to weeks in getting results back.
That defeats the whole purpose of testing and tracing.
And this is what you get when you have no leadership.
Now, treatment.
Since even vaccines are not 100% preventive,
and we won't have one until winter at best,
the ability to treat the disease is very important.
Now, there are some hopeful signs here.
But again, politicized stupidity is an obstacle in the US
with some politicians touting hydroxychloroquine as a cure, which it is not.
Even the Trump-appointed FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb has said,
this is one myth that needs to be put to death.
And I quote, he says, we can definitively say hydroxychloroquine doesn't work.
Now, what does work?
We do have some treatments that can help in some situations.
None of them qualify as a game changer.
First one, Remdesivir.
It's an antiviral that appears to reduce recovery time in some patients.
And there is some preliminary evidence that it may reduce the death rate.
I have links to some information about Remdesivir in the show notes.
The next one, Dexamethasome, was found in one study by the NHS in England.
Now, this looks like a good study.
Had a large study group, there were thousands of people involved.
And it appears that it reduced the death rate in people who were on ventilators.
In other words, the most severely ill patients.
Now, they did not find that it did anything for people who were less severely ill.
So, great if you get to that stage.
You know, if you're being ventilated, you've already got a very serious problem.
The idea is to stop short of that, if at all possible.
Another drug, technical name, LAM-002A, or more friendly name, Apilomod,
is a drug that has shown promise.
And this is another drug that has...
What they're basically doing with all of these is they are screening every existing drug they have out there.
And there's about 13,000 of them.
I link to a study in nature that talks about that.
And they're going through all of those drugs to find which are the most effective.
Now, LAM-002A of the 13,000 drugs they screened, that was the most effective in combating the virus,
including in lung cells infected with the virus.
Now, why does it matter that their screening is just seeing drugs?
All of the three of the ones I mentioned are existing drugs in the pharmacopia.
And the reason that that's important is that they have all demonstrated safety.
So, all they need to do is demonstrate efficacy to be approved.
And that can happen relatively quickly, which is why drug developers are screening all of the existing drugs.
Now, there's another interesting approach developed by scientists at the University of San Diego called Cellular Nano Spunges.
And what those are basically are molecules that have receptor...
They're large bodies that have receptor molecules on the surface.
And those receptor molecules mimic the ones on your cells, which the SARS virus uses to get into the cell and reproduce itself.
So, this is like a decoy.
The idea of the Cellular Nano Spunges is that they will attach to the virus.
And the virus gets no benefit from that because they aren't actually cells that it can replicate in.
But if they can basically take all of the receptor things away, it stops the virus from getting into your cells and replicating.
And finally, in the treatment realm, we do know now that blood plasma from recovered patients contains antibodies that can protect new patients.
Now, there's two problems with that. There's not a lot to go around.
And secondly, some of our regulations are perhaps questionable.
There was just reading a story today, in fact, about a fellow who was gay and he has recovered and his plasma is full of antibodies, but it's like, no, we want to accept blood donations from gay people.
And I know why that is, is because HIV was a huge problem, but, you know, serves this.
So, you know, the blood plasma, that's not going to be a general therapeutic, so don't think that's going to save the day.
Finally, immunization. And, you know, this is the one that we all want.
And the good news is that many different organizations are working on this, and we're even seeing some optimistic reports that we could have won approved by winter.
Now, that is very optimistic, and there's a huge danger.
The danger is that this pace of development means we skimp on the testing.
And if bad side effects occur that did not come out in testing, it could add to the terrible problem we already have with people not getting vaccinated.
Now, if you've never heard of thalidomide, it was a drug marketed to among others pregnant women, and it turned out to cause birth defects in children.
Now, that largely bypassed the United States for one reason.
The FDA inspector involved, a woman named Francis Kelsey, refused to approve the drug because she had concerns about incomplete data and inadequate testing.
For example, she pointed out, you never tested whether this drug crosses the placental barrier going from the mom into the baby.
Yeah, good point.
So, there are a lot of people who were born with birth defects all over the world, but very few in the United States because we never approved the drug.
And this was a key moment in the culture of testing in our food and drug administration, because she was correct to be concerned.
Dangerous drugs can do more harm than good, and testing them is the only way to be certain than that takes time.
Another issue we're going to run into, the vaccine may not be entirely painless.
The whole idea of a vaccine is to trigger a response in your body, and that response can involve things like headache, muscle soreness, and inflammation.
Achieving the needed degree of vaccination to get her to immunity is going to be a challenge.
And I'm going to quote from an article in New York magazine, again, link in the show notes.
In late May, 27% of Americans told an ABC News Washington Post poll that they would either probably not or definitely not take a coronavirus vaccine if one became available.
27% of people said that. That means we have 27% of Americans who are functionally stupid.
And that survey made no mention of potential side effects, let alone ones as significant as fever.
Given the prevalence of both tinfoil-hat libertarianism and healing crystal necklace new ageism in the United States, it was always going to be a challenge to get enough Americans to take a vaccine to achieve herd immunity.
Reports of a vaccine getting people sick, however mildly, would surely magnify that challenge.
So, you know, there's the status of the news right now.
Now, if you want to keep up, and maybe you don't, but I'm going to give you some resources.
Now, these are not the places your doctor would go to get information.
But frequently, you can link back to the original studies, and you know, if you want to get into the scientific journals, it's not impossible.
In fact, some of the studies that I've mentioned in this update, I've given you links to the journals.
But where are some places that you might want to go if you are an intelligent lay audience, which I am assuming is my audience.
First of all, place I go, CDC. All right. It's the gold standard.
This is the place that is devoted to combating infectious disease.
Another one I'll mention. There's a streaming site called Curiosity Stream, which I subscribe to, and they have documentaries including useful ones on coronavirus that are not bad.
Next, Nature Magazine is the premier science journal, and they have a weekly podcast, which contains a section called Coronapod, which is devoted to current news on the coronavirus.
In fact, for several months, they had a separate weekly Coronapod release, separate from their main podcast, they decided to fold them back in together.
Now, it's worth mentioning. Many of the reporters on this podcast have PhDs. So, you know, they do a good job.
There's a video podcast on YouTube that I love called Healthcare Triage, and it is hosted by Dr. Aaron Carroll.
Dr. Carroll is a professor at the Indiana University School of Medicine. At Indiana University, he is also the Vice Chair for Health Policy and Outcomes Research, and the Director of the Center for Health Policy and Professionalism Research.
Now, Healthcare Triage is a very useful series because he not only bases everything he says on research, but he also discusses how strong the results are in terms of the hierarchy of study designs we discussed previously.
And I'll put a link to that in the show notes as well. I did a podcast about a year ago, I think it was about a year ago, maybe a little bit more on the hierarchy of evidence.
So, this is worth noting. Another YouTube channel, SciShow, which presents a variety of shows on different topics, but one of the topics they cover regularly is COVID-19.
Now, the on-screen presenters are not scientists, but the scripts that they're working from are written by scientists and are fact-checked.
They're also very careful to give the date of the recording at the beginning of each COVID-19 episode, just in case further information comes out later.
And one of the huge problems you can run into is looking at information that was the state of what we knew two months ago and something happened.
An example of this, hydroxychloroquine, we know that it's not effective, but for a while there, it was going around that, oh, not only is it not effective, but it actually hurts people.
Well, that turned out to be an initial result based on a study that was later withdrawn.
So, I am not saying that hydroxychloroquine hurts people. The best evidence we have now is that it just doesn't do a damn thing.
So, I put a link in the show notes anyway to a playlist of SciShow's COVID-19 episodes.
Okay, science news. An excellent publication publishes bi-weekly except in the summer. Most of the authors of the articles are PhDs in the fields they cover.
So, it's an excellent. And basically, they give you summaries of all of the latest research.
Finally, there's Intelligencer, which is published by New York Magazine, and they have a monthly series of articles called Good and Bad News about COVID-19 with some excellent information.
And again, link in the show notes to the July article, which is the most current one that they have.
So, that's the state of where we are with coronavirus at the end of July. This is Hookah, and I'll mention I'm recording this on July 30th.
So, I'm going to sign off now. Remind you as always, wash your hands, wear your mask, and keep six feet away. Bye-bye.
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