30,000 in USA to test covid-19 vaccine in July

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-06-moderna-track-large-covid-vaccine.html

50 year old pill OM85

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-06-om85-bacteria-capsule-coronavirus-respiratory.html

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A review of 35 placebo-controlled studies involving 4,060 children concluded that immune stimulants, including OM85, reduced respiratory infections by an average of 40% in susceptible children.

OM85 has a good safety profile. A small proportion of people may experience some gastro-intestinal upset, but in clinical trials, such as one we conducted in infants, side effects are rarely seen.
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In countries where OM85 is available, doctors can prescribe it but people can also buy it over the counter, in the same way they might a complementary medicine or health food supplement.

OM85 has attracted plenty of skepticism in its time, with some people regarding it as "snake oil".

Scientists are skeptical when we don't understand why something works, or at least where we don't have a plausible explanation for how it works. The idea something swallowed but not absorbed could protect the lungs sounds fanciful, especially without solid explanations.

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It might be possible to boost one’s immune system against covid-19
by taking the oral polio vaccine again.

Since there are 3 different oral polio vaccines if one were to swallow one every 3 months this might lessen your chances of dying from covid-19 until the covid-19 vaccine comes out.

This is a similar idea to getting the 100 year old BCG vaccine that was mentioned in an earlier post in this thread.

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/heal...ion-against-covid-19-scientists-n1230071

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Chumakov referred to a three-year controlled trial conducted in Russia in the 1960s as the strongest evidence in support of using disease-specific vaccines to broadly ward off other viruses. In the study, which was conducted by Chumakov’s mother, researchers concluded that giving adults doses of the oral poliovirus vaccine cut deaths due to seasonal influenza and acute respiratory diseases three-fold.

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How about "old world" medicine attempts as a remedy? would seem to fit in with all the other gabillion possible inane treatments listed so far on this thread? https://youtu.be/y9C0DYjFZLw

“Old world” European folk medicines might contain something useful.

“Ancient” Chinese medicines,
particularly from the province of Yunnan,
should be examined since bats there have been the source of coronaviruses for probably thousands of years.

Since we now have covid antibody tests,
maybe 60+ year olds all around the earth should be tested to see if there is a pocket Somewhere of immune people.

Red Cross blood or plasma donors will get free covid antibody test results

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-06-blood-donors-results-coronavirus-antibody.html

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The American Red Cross will test all blood, platelet and plasma donations for COVID-19 antibodies so donors can learn whether they've been exposed to the new coronavirus.

"We recognize that individuals and public health organizations desire more information about COVID-19, and as an organization dedicated to helping others, the Red Cross is fortunate to be able to help during this pandemic," Chris Hrouda, president of Red Cross Biomedical Services, said in a news release.

The test—authorized by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration—may indicate if a person's immune system has produced antibodies to the coronavirus, even if they didn't have symptoms of COVID-19. A positive test result does not confirm immunity to the virus, and the test is not meant to diagnose illness, the Red Cross said.

For the next few months, blood, platelet and plasma donations will be tested using samples obtained at the time of donation. The samples will also undergo routine screening and infectious disease testing.

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https://www.bbc.com/news/health-53061281

Cheap steroid generic drug Dexamethasone
is able to cut death rate significantly on the very sickest covid patients who are on ventilators or supplemental oxygen

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In the trial, led by a team from Oxford University, about 2,000 hospital patients were given dexamethasone and compared with more than 4,000 who were not.
For patients on ventilators, it cut the risk of death from 40% to 28%.
For patients needing oxygen, it cut the risk of death from 25% to 20%.
Chief investigator Prof Peter Horby said: "This is the only drug so far that has been shown to reduce mortality - and it reduces it significantly. It's a major breakthrough."

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Poll claims Americans especially unhappy at this time

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-06-poll-americans-unhappiest-theyve-years.html

There is a wide variation in covid fatality rates by both skin color and urban area:

https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/ar...munities#Making-sense-of-incomplete-data

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For black people in the U.S., the death rate of COVID-19 is staggeringly high, compared with the population share.

As the AMP report notes, collectively, black Americans make up 13% of the population in all U.S. areas that released COVID-19 mortality data, but they account for 25% of the deaths.

“In other words, they are dying of the virus at a rate of roughly double their population share, among all American deaths where race and ethnicity is known.”

By comparison, “Across all 41 reporting jurisdictions combined, whites are considerably less likely to die from COVID-19 than expected, given their share of the population. They represent 61.7% of the combined population, but have experienced 49.7% of deaths in America where race and ethnicity is known.”

Echoing the Yale study, the AMP report found huge disparities in individual states. These disparities are much broader than the 2.4-times higher rate of mortality among black Americans, compared with white Americans.

For example, “In Kansas, black residents are 7 times more likely to have died than white residents, while in Washington, D.C., the rate among blacks is 6 times as high as it is for whites. In Missouri and Wisconsin, it is 5 times greater.”

The authors of the AMP report also deplored the mishandling of this crisis by the U.S. federal government, in terms of the gathering and disseminating of data on race.

Andi Egbert, a senior researcher at APM Research Lab, said, “I won’t speculate about motive, but I can’t believe in a modern economy that we don’t have a mandated, uniform way of reporting the data across states.”

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Edit: hard numbers from recent Medicare hospitalizations confirm above estimations

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-06-medicare-blacks-likelier-hospitalized-covid.html

Poll claims USA citizens reporting symptoms of Depression jump from typical 8%
to new high of 27%

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-06-pandemic-toll-mental-health-residents.html

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The latest results—released as the country enters the fourth month of a "new normal" governed by public health guidelines to reduce the spread of SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19—show that more than a quarter of U.S. residents (27 percent) "describe symptoms in a range that would be considered moderate or severe depression," according to the report.

The figure is more than three times higher than what has normally been observed in large national surveys. The National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, for example, finds that roughly 8 percent of U.S. residents reported moderate to severe depression between 2013 and 2016.

"Clearly, contemporary events are putting us all under a lot of stress, and we wanted to know if it was noticeable by the standards of our survey,"
says David Lazer, university distinguished professor of political science and computer and information sciences at Northeastern, and one of the researchers who conducted the study.

"And, boy, does it stick out," he says. "We're all stressed."

The researchers surveyed 18,132 U.S. residents in all 50 states and the District of Columbia between May 16 and May 31, and found stark differences in the reported mental health of people who said their lives have been disrupted "a great deal" by COVID-19 and the people who said their lives have been disrupted "a moderate amount" or less by the disease. Forty-two percent of people whose lives had been greatly disrupted reported moderate to severe depressive symptoms, while only 19 percent of those whose lives hadn't been disrupted as much reported such symptoms, according to the report.

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I have no way to dispute reported depression claims above.
I would however dispute the reasons behind this depression causation for the current nearly "perfect storm" of circumstances.
However those that study history, also likely find it depressing how "fragile" today's society is vs previous calamities faced, like the "war to end all wars", the Spanish flu, The Great depression, the Civil War, etc. We have IMO become a mental victim of our own success/luxury.

Agreed, the human condition has turned into being a bunch of pussies the last few decades... seems most have forgotten how "to suck it up and deal with it"

Low dose whole lung radiation for covid being trialled.

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-06-clinical-trials-low-dose-covid-infections.html

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Previous studies have shown that low-dose, whole lung radiation in the form of X-rays can effectively treat severe pneumonia, with minimal side effects. Two clinical trials are applying a modern version of this concept to test patients who have acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) as a result of COVID-19 infection.

For these trials, patients will undergo a single treatment of whole lung radiation to target and reduce pulmonary inflammation associated with COVID-19 infection in two separate phase II clinical trials. The studies are led by Arnab Chakravarti, MD, chair of the Department of Radiation Oncology at The Ohio State University

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This is why rural areas still need to be careful.

https://www.opb.org/news/article/ea...-county-states-largest-covid-19-outbreak

Casinos just opened this week in Pittsburgh. First Coronavirus employee found today.

Lack of stuff on the shelves seems to still be a problem here. Dental floss section at the grocery store is way low. Had a heck of a time even buying sandpaper the other day as the hardware store shelves are getting depleted. They are just selling out entire sections of product and nothing comes in to replace it.

Bought a quart of ppg primer a few weeks ago and they are low on paint and primer too. I got the last quart and had to buy a color I normally don't use (white) as they had no black DP 90 at all.

Yale U says tocilizumab show promise treating Cytokine Storm in covid

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-06-repurposed-drug-covid-inflammation.html

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The study represents the largest clinical series of COVID-19 patients treated with tocilizumab to date. The research examined the first 239 hospitalized COVID-19 patients at YNHH, 153 of whom were treated with tocilizumab.

The team found that COVID-19 patients with CRS who were treated with tocilizumab showed relatively low mortality rates overall compared to reports from other hospitals, especially those CRS patients who required mechanical ventilation—typically a poor prognostic indicator. The 14-day survival rate for all tocilizumab-treated patients, most of whom met admission criteria for severe COVID-19, was 87%. The 48 tocilizumab-treated patients who required mechanical ventilation spent an average of five and a half days on a ventilator, and their 14-day survival rate was 75%.

"Typically, at least half of the patients who require mechanical ventilation die, but in those treated with tocilizumab here, only 25% did," said Dr. Maricar Malinis, one of the senior authors and associate professor of medicine (infectious diseases).

Across studies, mortality rates for COVID-19 patients requiring ventilation ranges from 40% to 90%.

To determine which patients with COVID-19 would receive the drug, the Yale team designed an algorithm to identify patients who appeared to have CRS, as indicated by required oxygen and inflammatory markers.

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Nursing homes and covid

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-06-nursing-homes-covid-deaths.html

Covid comes to the “memory care unit”, written by a visiting wound care MD

https://www.medpagetoday.com/blogs/kevinmd/87170

It is possible giving the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine again might protect against the worst outcomes of covid-19

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-06-mmr-vaccine-worst-symptoms-covid-.html

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In Dr. Noverr's laboratory, in collaboration with Dr. Fidel, vaccination with a live attenuated fungal strain-induced trained innate protection against lethal polymicrobial sepsis. The protection was mediated by long-lived myeloid-derived suppressor cells (MDSCs) previously reported inhibiting septic inflammation and mortality in several experimental models. The researchers say that an MMR vaccine should be able to induce MDSCs that can inhibit or reduce the severe lung inflammation/sepsis associated with COVID-19. Mortality in COVID-19 cases is strongly associated with progressive lung inflammation and eventual sepsis.

Recent events provide support for the researchers' hypothesis. The milder symptoms seen in the 955 sailors on the U.S.S Roosevelt who tested positive for COVID-19 (only one hospitalization) may have been a consequence of the fact that the MMR vaccinations are given to all U.S. Navy recruits. In addition, epidemiological data suggest a correlation between people in geographical locations who routinely receive the MMR vaccine and reduced COVID-19 death rates. COVID-19 has not had a big impact on children, and the researchers hypothesize that one reason children are protected against viral infections that induce sepsis is their more recent and more frequent exposures to live attenuated vaccines that can also induce the trained suppressive MDSCs that limit inflammation and sepsis.

The researchers propose a clinical trial to test whether the MMR vaccine can protect against COVID-19, but in the meantime, they suggest that all adults, especially health care workers and individuals in nursing homes get the MMR vaccine. "If adults got the MMR as a child they likely still have some level of antibodies against measles, mumps, and rubella, but probably not the myeloid-derived suppressor cells," said Dr. Fidel. "While the MDSCs are long-lived, they are not life-long cells. So, a booster MMR would enhance the antibodies to measles, mumps, and rubella and reinitiate the MDSCs. We would hope that the MDSCs induced by the MMR would have a fairly good life-span to get through the critical time of the pandemic."

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Norway researchers identify two drugs that may work against covid...

https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/ar...cov-2-in-the-lab#The-winning-combination

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Nelfinavir, an anti-HIV drug, and amodiaquine, an antimalarial drug, exhibited the strongest synergy of all the possible combinations.

Interestingly, one of these drugs works by shielding the host cells, while the other targets the virus itself. This is a combined strategy that the researchers say has worked well against other viral infections.

The team checked that this drug combination was effective against each of seven available strains of SARS-CoV-2.

The researchers have now published their results in the journal Viruses.

“This orally available drug combination — nelfinavir-amodiaquine — inhibits the virus infection in cell cultures,” says senior study author Denis Kainov, an associate professor in the Norwegian University of Science and Technology’s Department of Clinical and Molecular Medicine. “It should be tested further in preclinical studies and clinical trials now.”

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