The biology of coronavirus COVID-19 - including research and treatments

Something positive-sounding for once: some apparent progress in vaccine development:

http://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world...sed-for-final-testing/ar-BB16JEn9?ocid=ASUDHP

 

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2022483

Notable aspects: the highest dose (250 μg) caused headache in 100% of recipients, fever in over 50%, along with severe fatigue in some recipients of this dosage. One recipient in the lowest dosage (25 μg) group had a significant immunological reaction (urticaria).

Notably even the lowest dosage resulted in seroconversion and the mean level of antibodies exceeded that of the convalescent plasma of COVID-19 patients.

Thus I am surprised at the choice of 50μg dose, a 100μg dose for the phase II trials.

This is only suggestive evidence, in fact it is impossible to say whether one or two doses is necessary without participants being directly exposed to the virus. I suspect this point will be ignored however and subsequent trials (and ultimately clinical dosage) will recommend two doses.

While this is a cause for concern, there is no concerning evidence so far to suggest that the immune responses won't be durable. Some researchers and journalists mistakenly confuse antibody kinetics 6-12 months post-infection with memory T-cell and B-cell responses. This decline in antibody kinetics observed post-COVID19 is normal and expected. The same kinetics occur after most infections where the virus is effectively neutralised and indeed similar kinetics are observed after measles vaccinations for example, yet no one is claiming that measles vaccinations only work for 6-12 months.

 

Merged thread

Randomized Re-Opening of Training Facilities during the COVID-19 pandemic

The train-study. Pre-print and not peer reviewed. The Norwegian institute of public health and Atle Fretheim involved. That is the guy who sent some quite interesting mails to Cochrane last year when discussing the get-saga. This seems to be a great example of questionable design and how not to do it. Hurried covid-19 research and damaging side-effects. The last thing you probably should do, is go very public and state that training in gyms are safe?

I thought today’s comment in the newspaper Aftenposten by prof. Joar Vittersø was quite good and to the point. Google translate.

Misleading about the spread of Corona and traning in gyms

Joar Vittersø
Professor, University of Tromsø

A Norwegian study found that people who trained at gyms in Oslo in May and June did not contract covid-19 infection. The discovery has received a great deal of attention and has been featured in the New York Times, Science and the Norwegian media.

The researchers behind the study are quoted as saying that it is safe to use gyms. This is a misleading message from a bad research project.

Joar Vittersø is Professor of Social Psychology at the University of Tromsø.
None of those who trained were infected with corona. The study therefore shows nothing other than what we know from before: No infection is transmitted if there is no infection to be transmitted. One does not need to do research to reach that conclusion. No matter what non-infected people are allowed to do in an experiment, they will not infect each other.

When the researchers saw that none of the participants had covid-19, they should put the study in the drawer. Instead, they wrote an article as if they had made an interesting discovery. The consequence is that they have spread an undocumented message about security.

The study shows another unfortunate consequence of urgency research. The results have been published as a so-called pre-print, which means that no experts have assessed the quality of the study. We do not know what the peers will say in this case, but the criticism in the article's online comment field is predominantly negative. And that is more than fair given the lack of quality.

Researchers, like everyone else, should be careful about spreading uncertain knowledge where the consequences of making mistakes can endanger life and health.

We can also ask if it is ethically justifiable to start a study where the intention is to let people who are infected with a potentially deadly virus train with someone who is not infected, to see if new cases of infection occur!

We know that people in gyms can infect each other with covid-19. If the study contributes to such facts being ignored, the consequence may be more spread of infection. Then we have a deplorable example of how meaningless research and hasty conclusions can increase the risk of disease.

Maybe the health authorities should warn against misinterpretations of this study?


https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.06.24.20138768v2

Protocol can be downloaded here
https://www.trainstudy.no/about/

 

Moved from the Worldwide spread and control thread.

As if we didn't have enough to worry about, there are now multiple reports that COVID-19 inflammatory syndrome sometimes occurs in adults.

 

Result from a local Swedish study. Gothenburg is Sweden's second largest city.

The original source is paywalled:
Göteborgs-Posten: Resultaten har kommit – så många var smittade i Göteborg

 

Dr Fauci on This Week in Virology with Vincent Racaniello! Discussing SARS-Cov-2 transmission, testing, immunity, pathogenesis, vaccines and preparedness.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_Vy6fgaBPE

 

Information on which treatments appear to work - and which don't:

http://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknew...elp-hurt-for-covid-19/ar-BB16Siwt?ocid=ASUDHP

See also http://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world...mune-cells/ar-BB16SzLZ?li=AAnZ9Ug&ocid=ASUDHP

 

The COVID19 symptom tracker app developed by KCL is distinguishing different groups via symptoms.

Would this not be an idea for ME?

 

Those groups don't appear to mean much besides making arbitrary distinctions, to the patient community anyway. When you don't ask the right questions, you will rarely get relevant answers. Too much anchoring on typical symptoms and arbitrary lines in the sand.

This is one such comment but there are a few more of the same issue:

https://twitter.com/user/status/1284152396608921600


https://twitter.com/user/status/1284216173136158720


To his credit, Spector appears to be willing to adapt:

https://twitter.com/user/status/1284359247669727236

 

Thanks @rvallee . I didn't dig deep enough, but liked the potential for something along lines of decent collaboration between researchers and patients to use machine learning to dig deeper into potential subgròups.

Be interesting to see where this goes

 

Yes, Fretheim is the one who refused to allow Cochrane to withdraw the Exercise review. He led on a Norwegian schools study which was rejected (in my view quite sensibly) http://www.isrctn.com/ISRCTN44152751. Hilda Bastian who is leading the Independent Advisory Group for the update of the Cochrane exercise review commented on the gym study pre-print that she thought it was great they had done it, but they were too positive in the pre-print. She didn't criticise it as much as others. In May she Tweeted to Fretheim that she was disappointed the schools study wasn't going ahead. In my view neither the gym or the proposed schools studies are ethical.

 

A Norwegian study found that people who worked out at gyms in Oslo in late May and early June did not contract COVID-19 infections. The discovery has received a great deal of attention and has been featured in the New York Times, Science and the Norwegian media.

The researchers behind the study are quoted as saying that it is safe to use gyms.

This is a misleading message from a flawed research project.

The experiment is flawed because none of those who trained at the gyms were infected with corona. The study therefore shows nothing else than what we already know: No infection can be transmitted if there is no infection to transmit. No research is needed to reach that conclusion. No matter what non-infected people are subjected to in an experiment, they will not infect each other.

When the researchers realized that none of their participants had COVID-19, they should have simply filed the study in the drawer. Instead, a manuscript was written up as if a randomized controlled trial experiment with an important discovery had been completed.

https://sciencenorway.no/epidemic-o...s-can-infect-each-other-with-covid-19/1713638

 

Title : Thyroid Function Analysis in 50 Patients with COVID-19:A Retrospective Study

Authors : Min Chen, Weibin Zhou, and Weiwei Xu

Link to full paper PDF : https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/pdfplus/10.1089/thy.2020.0363

 

Emerging need of therapeutic strategies to mitigate the complex long-term symptoms after mild to moderate COVID-19

https://www.researchgate.net/public...term_symptoms_after_mild_to_moderate_COVID-19

I personally found this very interesting because it resembles the progression of the disease for my mum. After approximately 8-9 weeks with mild symptoms she got worse and developed extreme fatigue, covid skin rashes and severe indigestion. She's also got covid toes. She's never had respiratory issues or even a fever.
This was very helpful for me to read.

I found it through this paywalled article :
https://www.dn.se/debatt/flodvag-av-langtidssjuka-covid-19-patienter-vantar/

ETA: article
Link to full-text pdf:

 

It looks like the hypothesis that SARS-CoV-2 accidentally escaped from a lab in Wuhan is still on the cards...

In the article the authors explain the flaws of the Andersen paper (which was posted earlier in this thread) as well as give a detailed description of their own hypothesis.

https://jonathanlatham.net/a-proposed-origin-for-sars-cov-2-and-the-covid-19-pandemic/

(Edit: typo)

 

About post Covid, no mentioning of "ME" or "CFS" though so I post it here

Over half of coronavirus patients in Spain have developed neurological problems, studies show
New research indicates that Covid-19 is causing a wide range of disorders in the nervous system and may be directly attacking the brain

"For Segura, finding the endothelial cells (the thin layer of cells that line the interior surface of blood vessels) in the samples of analyzed brain tissue could indicate that the coronavirus has overcome the blood-brain barrier, and that the neurological problems have not been caused by weakness from the immune system’s response to Covid-19. According to Segura, the world is facing “a respiratory virus that is also neurotoxic.”"

 

There was an interesting report on the BBC 10 o'clock news tonight to the effect that scientists are rather clearer now about the risk factors caused by Covid-19, such as gender, ethnicity, job, pre-existing conditions and so on, and that they've created a "Covid score" system, whereby you use your age as a starting point and then add and subtract points according to which risk factors apply to you. I suspect that it's not quite as straightforward at the report made it sound, but it did sound as though it might be a useful starting point.

 

https://twitter.com/user/status/1283763315362103298


https://twitter.com/user/status/1283767601831829506

 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-53467022

Stephen Holgate is a co-founder of Synairgen. They originally developed this for asthma and COPD etc

"The treatment from Southampton-based biotech Synairgen uses a protein called interferon beta which the body produces when it gets a viral infection."

"The initial findings suggest the treatment cut the odds of a Covid-19 patient in hospital developing severe disease - such as requiring ventilation - by 79%"