Japan asked its people to voluntarily make less social contacts to reduce Covid infections.
Cell phone location data show they reduced interactions 70%

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-11-tokyo-voluntary-standstill-covid-tracks.html

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In a study from The University of Tokyo Institute of Industrial Science, researchers examined location data from more than 200,000 mobile phone users. Using these data, the researchers calculated the human movement in Tokyo before and during the state of emergency. The striking findings were published in Scientific Reports.

"Using anonymized data that represented about 2% of the population, we could compute human movement and contact rates at a 100-meter grid-cell scale," study first author Takahiro Yabe says. "We found that 1 week into the state of emergency, human mobility reduced by 50%, which led to a 70% drop in social contacts."
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#1 Link to story -> Did the WHO Just Accidently Confirm COVID is no more dangerous than the Flu?

"The World Health Organization has finally confirmed what we (and many experts and studies) have been saying for months – the coronavirus is no more deadly or dangerous than seasonal flu.

The WHO’s top brass made this announcement during a special session of the WHO’s 34-member executive board on Monday October 5th, it’s just nobody seemed to really understand it.

In fact, they didn’t seem to completely understand it themselves."

#2 link to story -> https://off-guardian.org/2020/10/08/who-accidentally-confirms-covid-is-no-more-dangerous-than-flu/

Same story about the WHO, but a different take on it.

I think there are 3 posts in this thread about Covid being less deadly than “typical” winter season Influenza strains below a certain age, like 50 years old for males.

Influenza H1N1 in years 1917-1919 was more deadly in humans than Covid-19

Influenza H2N2 in years 1957-1958 was in the same human fatality range as Covid-19

Influenza H5N1 aka “bird flu”
has not caused a human epidemic yet,
but seems to kill more than 20% of the humans who have caught it.
H5N1 has killed billions of birds.

If you are a male over 50 years old,
have type A blood,
are overweight,
have a heart problem like right atrial enlargement,
have COPD,
have diabetes,
have kidney disease,
then Covid-19 infection is something to take extensive steps to avoid.

British say tinnitus made worse by Covid

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-11-covid-tinnitus-worse.html

The big problem is that nobody knows how many people have been infected with the virus. We roughly know how many people have died, and we have an official infection count, but nobody knows the true infection count. It could be double or triple or even more than that of the official infection number. A few different studies have taken a run at it but the numbers seem to be all over the map. So the real death rate could be much lower than the official number.

Columbia U. says children have distinctly different immune response to Covid than adults do

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-11-children-antibodies-response-sars-cov-.html

UNC-CH ties increased smoking to anxiety about pandemic

https://www.news-medical.net/news/2...S-citizens-during-COVID-19-pandemic.aspx

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A significant correlation was observed between smoking status and anxiety level in the study. People who smoke daily showed a higher prevalence of moderate or severe anxiety symptoms. Previous studies have also pointed out that people with anxiety disorders develop a tendency to smoke daily. Therefore, an increase in the rate of smoking is likely among people suffering from anxiety in adverse conditions like the COVID-19 pandemic.
...snip...
Regarding work-related stress factors, financial hardship was found to be the major cause of anxiety. About 45% and 17% of participants reported a loss of income or a loss of employment during the pandemic, respectively. An increased prevalence of anxiety was also observed among healthcare and non-healthcare essential workers. Financial hardship is considered to be a major contributing factor to the worst mental health outcomes. Given the pandemic-related financial crisis, appropriate social support systems and coping measures should be developed to minimize the impact of financial stress on emotional distress.

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Kansas analysis of how wearing a mask slows Covid transmission rates

https://ipsr.ku.edu/covid19/images/MaskMandateUpdate.pdf

Retrospective blood sample analysis from early May in NY City gives 1% fatality ratio for Covid-19 averaged over all peoples ages.

https://www.peoplespharmacy.com/articles/how-many-new-yorkers-have-contracted-covid-19

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Seroprevalence increased more rapidly among urgent care than regular care patients. However, by late May it had stabilized at approximately 22 percent in both groups. That’s how the investigators estimate that more than 1.7 million New Yorkers had been infected with the coronavirus by the beginning of the summer.

By that time, 16,674 New Yorkers had died of COVID-19.
As a result, the researchers calculate the infection fatality rate (IFR) at about 1 percent.

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Nursing home resident deaths rising in 20 US States

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-11-nursing-home-covid-cases-four-fold.html

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Nursing homes and other long-term care facilities account for about 1% of the U.S. population,
but represent 40% of COVID-19 deaths,
according to the COVID Tracking Project.
...snip...
The 20 states analyzed in the study were
Alaska, Arkansas, Iowa, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Utah, Wisconsin, West Virginia, and Wyoming.
They were selected because they're now seeing their highest hospitalization rates for COVID-19.

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Early data hints Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine 90% effective

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-11-pfizer-early-covid-vaccine-effective.html

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Pfizer says an early peek at its vaccine data suggests the shots may be 90% effective at preventing COVID-19, indicating the company is on track later this month to file an emergency use application with U.S. regulators.

Monday's announcement doesn't mean a vaccine is imminent: This interim analysis, from an independent data monitoring board, looked at 94 infections recorded so far in a study that has enrolled nearly 44,000 people in the U.S. and five other countries.
...snip...
Volunteers in the final-stage studies, and the researchers, don't know who received the real vaccine or a dummy shot. But a week after their second required dose, Pfizer's study began counting the number who developed COVID-19 symptoms and were confirmed to have the coronavirus.
...snip...
Pfizer doesn't plan to stop its study until it records 164 infections among all the volunteers, a number that the FDA has agreed is enough to tell how well the vaccine is working. The agency has made clear that any vaccine must be at least 50% effective.

No participant so far has become severely ill, Gruber said. Nor could he provide a breakdown of how many of the infections had occurred in older people, who are at highest risk from COVID-19.

Participants were tested only if they developed symptoms, leaving unanswered whether vaccinated people could get infected but show no symptoms and unknowingly spread the virus.

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More info. This one is the best of 20 invented back in March.

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-11-biontech-plucky-german-upstart-covid-.html

At least in ferrets, new nasal spray against Covid works

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-11-nasal-coronavirus-transmission.html

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In the ferret experiments, the lipopeptide was delivered into the noses of six ferrets. Pairs of treated ferrets were then housed with two control ferrets that received a saline nasal spray and one ferret infected with SARS-CoV-2.

After 24 hours of intense direct contact among the ferrets, tests revealed that none of the treated ferrets caught the virus from their infected cagemate and their viral load was precisely zero, while all of the control animals were highly infected.

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There seems to be an even stronger link between obesity and severe Covid

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-11-covid-reveals-obesity-body-real.html

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In most recent news, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that 73% of nurses who have been hospitalized from COVID-19 had obesity. In addition, a recent study found that obesity could interfere with the effectiveness of a COVID-19 vaccine.
...snip...
Initially physicians believed that having obesity increased only your risk of getting sicker from COVID-19, not your chance of being infected in the first place. Now, newer analysis shows that not only does obesity increase your risk of being sicker and dying from COVID-19; obesity increases your risk of getting infected in the first place.

In March 2020, observational studies noted hypertension, diabetes and coronary artery disease as the most common other conditions—or co-morbidities—in patients with more severe COVID-19 disease. But it was the editors of Obesity journal who first raised the alarm on April 1, 2020 that obesity would likely prove to be an independent risk factor for more severe effects of COVID-19 infection.

Additionally, two studies including nearly 10,000 patients have shown that patients who have both COVID-19 and obesity have a higher risk of death at days 21 and 45 compared to patients with a normal body mass index, or BMI.
...snip...
And doctors sometimes don't know how or when to prescribe medications for patients with obesity. For example, eight FDA-approved weight loss medications are on the market, but only 2% of eligible patients receive prescriptions for them from their physicians.

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More on this

https://www.news-medical.net/news/2...body-mass-index-and-ABO-blood-group.aspx

Cleveland Clinic suggests melatonin might be a Covid-19 treatment

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-11-melatonin-covid-treatment.html

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Results from a new Cleveland Clinic-led study suggest that melatonin, a hormone that regulates the sleep-wake cycle and is commonly used as an over-the-counter sleep aid, may be a viable treatment option for COVID-19.
...snip...
According to the findings published today in PLOS Biology, a novel artificial intelligence platform developed by Lerner Research Institute researchers to identify possible drugs for COVID-19 repurposing has revealed melatonin as a promising candidate.

Analysis of patient data from Cleveland Clinic's COVID-19 registry also revealed that melatonin usage was associated with a nearly 30 percent reduced likelihood of testing positive for SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19) after adjusting for age, race, smoking history and various disease comorbidities. Notably, the reduced likelihood of testing positive for the virus increased from 30 to 52 percent for African Americans when adjusted for the same variables.

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From study of 492 Covid patients begun back in April
National Institute of Health concludes
Hydroxychloroquine has no measurable benefit

https://www.nih.gov/news-events/new...not-benefit-adults-hospitalized-covid-19

Attempt to make cheap $1 nasal spray that would reduce Covid infection

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/11/can-nose-full-chicken-antibodies-ward-coronavirus-infections

Cold plasma jet kills Covid on surfaces within 3 minutes with little harm to material

https://www.sciencealert.com/jets-of-cold-plasma-can-safely-eradicate-coronavirus-from-many-surfaces

It what might be a surprisingly good thing,
Covid-19 might linger in your gut cells long after infection,
which stimulates your immune system to improve the antibodies against Covid-19.

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-11-covid-immunity-months.html

Sample quote

Maybe residual viral particles are hiding out somewhere, the team surmised. They decided to go fishing in the gut. (Like the lungs, people's intestines are carpeted with the kind of cells SARS-CoV-2 can invade, Nussenzweig explains.) They teamed up with physicians from Mount Sinai Hospital and examined biopsies from seven of 14 patients who had recovered from COVID-19. In the intestinal tissue, the researchers found viral traces, including SARS-CoV-2's telltale crown of spikes. "The images are quite striking," Gaebler says.

It's possible that antibodies mutate in response to the residual viral antigen tucked away in people's bowels, Nussenzweig says, though there may be other caches of coronavirus in the body.

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French flout new lockdown rules

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-11-french-flout-lockdown-survey.html

Luvox depression drug side effect
seems to make it a good Covid-19 treatment during at home recovery

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-11-fluvoxamine-illness-covid-patients.html

Sample quote

Researchers compared the outcomes of those treated with fluvoxamine to the outcomes of those given an inactive placebo.

After 15 days, none of the 80 patients who had received the drug experienced serious clinical deterioration.
Meanwhile, six of the 72 patients given placebo (8.3%) became seriously ill, with four requiring hospitalization.

The study is published online Nov. 12 in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

"The patients who took fluvoxamine did not develop serious breathing difficulties or require hospitalization for problems with lung function,"
said the paper's first author, Eric J. Lenze, MD, the Wallace and Lucille Renard Professor of Psychiatry.
"Most investigational treatments for COVID-19 have been aimed at the very sickest patients, but it's also important to find therapies that prevent patients from getting sick enough to require supplemental oxygen or to have to go to the hospital. Our study suggests fluvoxamine may help fill that niche."

Fluvoxamine is used commonly to treat obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), social anxiety disorder and depression.
It is in a class of drugs known as selective serotonin-reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs),
but unlike other SSRIs, fluvoxamine interacts strongly with a protein called the sigma-1 receptor. That receptor also helps regulate the body's inflammatory response.

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