Emergence of a Deadly Coronavirus

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Yesterday I discussed using anti malaria drugs chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine to treat the coronavirus. There was an article in the news on this today:

Malaria drugs are showing "promising" initial results as a potential coronavirus treatment, a toxicologist and economic researcher said Saturday.

Appearing on "Fox & Friends Weekend," Dr. Chris Martenson said the experimental drugs -- including hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin -- were made available on Thursday by the Food and Drug Administration.

Although chloroquine has a "spotty past" and is unsafe at certain levels, Martenson noted that at the levels used in studies, the drug seems to "be reasonably safe" and works by allowing zinc to stop viruses from replicating.

In addition, azithromycin could potentially stop secondary infections in damaged lungs, he said.

Source: Toxicologist says anti-malaria drugs show 'promise' in treating coronavirus

Azithromycin makes sense.

It’s given for post-cold bacterial infections like bronchitis.

Yep....definitely intriguing.

A ripe topic for quick and timely study.

I just ran a quick Google search and found a large number of articles that explain the role zinc plays with the immune system.

From my fuzzy logic, it seems like you would want to replicate success stories. The two nations that seem to have turned the tide on the coronavirus pandemic are China and South Korea. So what medical protocols did they use to get there. When I searched the Internet, one of the drugs they both employed was chloroquine. Here are some interesting extractions from a recent article:

Chloroquine, is a widely prescribed anti-malaria pill that was first approved in the U.S. in 1949.

China has found that chloroquine is effective against COVID-19, the state-owned Xinhua news agency reported on February 17. Countries including China, South Korea, and Belgium have added chloroquine to their treatment guidelines.

As dozens of drug companies rush into research projects to develop antibodies and other next-generation therapeutics, chloroquine stands out as a potentially simple, cheap, and scalable treatment, though we haven't yet seen data from any randomized clinical trials, the gold standard of medical research.

"If clinical data confirm the biological results, the novel coronavirus-associated disease will have become one of the simplest and cheapest to treat and prevent among infectious respiratory diseases," a group of French researchers wrote in a paper published on February 15 in the International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents.

One of the three authors of that article was Didier Raoult, a prominent infectious-disease expert who's running a clinical trial in France to test a version of the drug called hydroxychloroquine on a few dozen patients with COVID-19. It's one of many clinical studies going on around the world testing chloroquine or hydroxychloroquine. Early reports of Raoult's trial were positive, with Raoult saying chloroquine appeared to shorten the time that people with COVID-19 are infectious.

When combined with the antibiotic azithromycin, it also reduced the viral load in these patients, he added. Azithromycin helps fight lung infections that can come with COVID-19 and may play a role in fighting the virus, Medscape reported.

Steven Seedhouse, a biotech analyst at Raymond James, said chloroquine was just as promising as any treatment option for COVID-19. That includes remdesivir, an antiviral drug being developed by the giant biotech company Gilead Sciences that World Health Organization officials have called "the most promising candidate" for COVID-19 treatment.

He recently analyzed the early evidence for three top drugs being tested for COVID-19 — remdesivir, chloroquine, and Kaletra, an HIV drug sold by AbbVie — and concluded that chloroquine was the most promising candidate.

"If we had to pick one of the three at this point that actually seems most likely to have the biggest impact on treating COVID-19 in the coming months/years, it would be chloroquine," he said.

Andrea Savarino is an Italian scientist who has worked at the Italian National Institute of Health, the country's top medical research body, since 2006. He has been studying chloroquine and its potential uses for even longer than that, starting as a virologist in 1994.

During the 2003 outbreak of SARS — also a coronavirus — Savarino showed in laboratory research that chloroquine may be a useful weapon against it. But by the time his research was published in The Lancet in November 2003, the outbreak had dissipated and there were no human cases available to test.

In Australia, researchers at the University of Queensland have said a combination of chloroquine and Kaletra led to the recovery of some of the first COVID-19 patients in Australia.

"It's a potentially effective treatment," David Paterson, the director of the university's Centre for Clinical Research, told the Australian news site News.com.au.

Savarino said he had heard anecdotal accounts from other countries as well, including Japan, India, and Thailand.

Source: A malaria pill from the 1940s has caught the eyes of doctors, analysts, and even Elon Musk as a potential coronavirus treatment

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11,645, to be exact.

That’s a high hospitalization rate. Are these considered “mild” cases?

What percentage of the younger people are hospitalized? People under 50?

Based on a little research, it seems higher than what we might think.

It still is said, throughout the Internet, that older, immunocompromised people with preexistent conditions are most vulnerable to being in serious condition.

I disagree with those who say "everyone will get sick." I've very rarely been sick in my entire life because I consistently practice good hygiene, take care of my health, and follow the advice of medical experts.