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"Coronavirus and the US" or "We are all going to die!!!!"

bilby said:
fromderinside said:
So in two years western democracies, including Australia, which continue to trade individual freedom for elder deaths will have herd immunity and broken economies with nothing but millions of deaths to show for it.
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Not including Australia.

Probably including Austria, which is a completely different country.

Don't worry though, when tourism is eventually allowed again, I am sure the souvenir shops in Vienna will still sell toy kangaroos and koalas for the avoidance of arguments with Americans.
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I'm not sure they did previously - though items like this are quite popular: https://aus-oesterreich.at/Souvenirs-Oesterreich/Oesterreich/Magnet-No-kangaroos-in-Austria
 
repoman said:
Cool MP talking about Vitamin D deficiency and Covid

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In what universe is an MP with an education in economics and a career focus on whining about civil liberties while denying civil liberties to LGBT people someone to take medical advice from?
 
Jokodo, if you and your elderly relatives are taking Vitamin D why not stop because an idiot homophobe must be wrong about it?
 
I have no expertise in this area and am just trying to apply logic to the various info that's been put out. I know they are claiming that he new strain is more easily and quickly spread but no evidence it is more deadly. However, I would guess that the latter is more about there just not being the data needed yet to evaluate it's deadliness. There would be tons of confounding variables that need to be controlled for.

From a purely theoretical standpoint, wouldn't the same mechanisms that make the new strain of COVID spread more quickly and easily also make it lead to more severe symptoms? Severity of symptoms is thought to be tied to initial viral load exposure, due to your immune systems not being able to marshal a response quick enough. It would seem that the reason it would spread more quickly is that less of a viral load is needed to lead to infection. Why wouldn't that same feature mean that you need less of a viral load exposure to have a severe reaction?

What mechanism of ease of spread would not have implications for how easily one can be exposed to a high viral load?
 
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repoman said:
Jokodo, if you and your elderly relatives are taking Vitamin D why not stop because an idiot homophobe must be wrong about it?
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I'm skeptical about the vitamin D deficiency claims because I've been deficient for years and I haven't even had a cold in over 10 years. I take D supplements now and have been for years. Sometimes my levels are normal but for some reason, I've had a difficult time getting it back to normal for the last two years. I think if D deficiency was related to being prone to viral or bacterial infections, I wouldn't be so healthy. I do have mild osteoporosis, but I have never had a fracture and I do intense exercise everyday to help keep me healthy as well as making sure that I have good balance and am not prone to falls.

The vitamin D panacea has been around for well over a decade, but there's never been much consistent evidence to support some of the claims. Of course, I'm not going to stop taking D because I am so deficient and hate spending time in the sun. I just doubt that D deficiency makes one more prone to COVID or other infectious respiratory diseases. Many if not most older females have D deficiency, probably because we don't spend much time outdoors. I found that to be true of my former patients when I worked in long term care.

I didn't watch the linked video. I hate watching videos, nothing personal. I just prefer to read.
 
repoman said:
Jokodo, if you and your elderly relatives are taking Vitamin D why not stop because an idiot homophobe must be wrong about it?
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I don't know whether he's wrong about it. I don't even know what he says about it. I have better things to do with my times than watching an economist bloviating about medical science.

Obviously you like his political leanings, but that doesn't make him right about a topic he knows nothing about. Sure, it doesn't make him wrong either, but thinking it's relevant what he has to say shows your irrationality.
 
COVID infections might be related to new cases of Diabetes

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/02/01/covid-new-onset-diabetes/

Mihail Zilbermint is used to treating diabetes — he heads a special team that cares for patients with the metabolic disorder at Suburban Hospital in Bethesda, Md. But as the hospital admitted increasing numbers of patients with covid-19, his caseload ballooned.
“Before, we used to manage maybe 18 patients per day,” he said. Now his team cares for as many as 30 daily.
Many of those patients had no prior history of diabetes. Some who developed elevated blood sugar while they had covid-19, the illness caused by the novel coronavirus, returned to normal by the time they left the hospital. Others went home with a diagnosis of full-blown diabetes. “We’ve definitely seen an uptick in patients who are newly diagnosed,” Zilbermint said.
Although covid-19 often attacks the lungs, it is increasingly associated with a range of problems including blood clots, neurological disorders, and kidney and heart damage. Researchers say new-onset diabetes may soon be added to those complications — both Type 1, in which people cannot make the insulin needed to regulate their blood sugar, and Type 2, in which they make too little insulin or become resistant to their insulin, causing their blood sugar levels to rise. But scientists do not know whether covid-19 might hasten already developing problems or actually cause them — or both.


As early as January 2020, doctors in Wuhan, China, noticed elevated blood sugar in patients with covid-19. Physicians in Italy, another early hot spot, wondered whether diabetes diagnoses might follow, given the long-observed association between viral infections and the onset of diabetes. That association was seen in past outbreaks of other coronavirus illnesses such as influenza and SARS.
A year after the pandemic began, the precise nature and scope of the covid-diabetes link remain a mystery. Many of those who develop diabetes during or after covid-19 have risk factors, such as obesity or a family history of the disease. Elevated blood glucose levels also are common among those taking dexamethasone, a steroid that is a front-line treatment for covid-19. But cases also have occurred in patients with no known risk factors or prior health concerns. And some cases develop months after the body has cleared the virus.
John Kunkel, a 47-year-old banking executive in Evening Shade, Ark., was one of the surprise cases. He was hospitalized with covid-19 in early July. During a follow-up visit with his doctor, he learned he had dangerously high blood glucose levels and was readmitted. Kunkel has since received a diagnosis of Type 2 diabetes.

“I had no preexisting health issues,” he said. “I was blown away. Why?”
Kunkel has had five emergency room visits and three hospital stays since getting covid-19. He recently lost his job because he was unable to return to work, given his continuing health problems. “Will you get your life back?” he asked. “Nobody knows.”
As many as 14.4 percent of people hospitalized with severe covid-19 developed diabetes, according to a global analysis published Nov. 27 in the journal Diabetes, Obesity and Metabolism. The international group of researchers sifted through reports of uncontrolled hyperglycemia, or high blood sugar, in more than 3,700 covid-19 patients across eight studies. While those diagnoses might be the result of a long-observed response to severe illness, or to treatment with steroids, the authors wrote, a direct effect from covid-19 “should also be considered.”

Concerns that covid-19 might be directly implicated also were supported, they said, by the exceptionally high doses of insulin that diabetes patients with severe covid-19 often require and the dangerous complications they develop.
Researchers do not understand exactly how covid-19 might trigger Type 1 or Type 2 diabetes, or whether the cases are temporary or permanent. But they are racing to find answers to these and other questions, including whether the novel coronavirus may have spawned an entirely new type of diabetes that might play out differently from the traditional forms of the disease.
Francesco Rubino, a diabetes surgery professor at King’s College London, is convinced there is an underlying connection between the diseases.
Over the summer, he and a group of other diabetes experts launched a global registry of patients with covid-19-related diabetes. After they spread the word with an editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine, more than 350 institutions from across the world responded, he said.

New diagnoses of diabetes in people with no classic risk factors also are scattered throughout case reports: A 37-year-old, previously healthy Chinese man who went to the hospital with a severe, and in some cases fatal, diabetes complication; a 19-year-old German who developed Type 1 diabetes five to seven weeks after a novel coronavirus infection but who lacked the antibodies commonly associated with the autoimmune disease.
Doctors at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, meanwhile, noticed an increase in the number of Type 2 diagnoses in children, as well as a severe complication of diabetes. After some of them showed evidence of past coronavirus infections, Senta Georgia, an investigator in the hospital’s Saban Research Institute, began looking deeper. Her research, which repurposes tissue from primates used in vaccine tests, is undergoing peer review.
“Only with the scientific public square can we put all of this data out there, evaluate its strengths and weaknesses … until we really get the information we need,” Georgia said
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This is so weird.
 
Is it not true that lots of people are on thin ice and silently headed towards diabetes?

Early-Diagnosis-by-GTIR.jpeg

How can one know if they have a pre-existing health issue with regards to pancreatic function and insulin resistance if this is not tested much?

If these people were tested with an oral glucose challenge with insulin and glucose measured and so on this data would be interesting.

Having been a massive sugar addict and moderate drinker but still luckily only slightly chubby I am not confident at all regarding my metabolic health. But have cleaned up my diet as much as possible in the past year.

It is tough to stay healthy and not eat all day and have too much sugar or bread which is almost the same. And once you are on that junkie train it is hard to get off.
 
repoman said:
Is it not true that lots of people are on thin ice and silently headed towards diabetes?

View attachment 31698

How can one know if they have a pre-existing health issue with regards to pancreatic function and insulin resistance if this is not tested much?

If these people were tested with an oral glucose challenge with insulin and glucose measured and so on this data would be interesting.

Having been a massive sugar addict and moderate drinker but still luckily only slightly chubby I am not confident at all regarding my metabolic health. But have cleaned up my diet as much as possible in the past year.

It is tough to stay healthy and not eat all day and have too much sugar or bread which is almost the same. And once you are on that junkie train it is hard to get off.
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They are still studying this reaction, but some of the people were very healthy and had no preexisting conditions. It also says that other viruses sometimes resulted in the start of diabetes. That is something that I didn't know.

Off topic. I do have some advice for you, and any other carb addict who reads this. If you are a carb addict like I am, do some intense aerobic exercise, even fast walking a couple of miles per day may work. I'm not predisposed to diabetes but my yearly blood glucose levels have dropped a bit since I increased my exercise to 7 days a week for 30 to 45 minutes, despite eating more sweets and carbs than ever. Of course, there are limits, but I'm in better shape at 71 than I ever was in my 30s or 40s. Brisk exercise might help you too. There's a lot of research that suggests that exercise is even more important than diet.

Back on topic. I don't understand why the virus may predispose a healthy person to diabetes but considering the high number of cases, it's unlikely that it's due to all of these people being predisposed to diabetes. Plus, it mentioned that diabetics who had COVID had higher than usual blood glucose levels, so there might be something to these claims. There is still so much that medical science doesn't fully understand about this awful virus.
 
I read long time ago a study which basically concluded that if you are fat but have normal sugar level, it only means that you don't have last set of symptoms. So yeah, you ARE sick even if you don't feel it yet.

Also, asians when fat are very susceptible to full blown type 2 diabetes.
 
barbos said:
I read long time ago a study which basically concluded that if you are fat but have normal sugar level, it only means that you don't have last set of symptoms. So yeah, you ARE sick even if you don't feel it yet.

Also, asians when fat are very susceptible to full blown type 2 diabetes.
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Yeah. I get it, but it's still a weird infection.

I know plenty of obese people who don't have Type II diabetes, so I'm a bit skeptical that all obese people end up with that disease, but most will have hypertension or heart disease at some point in their lives. Both my and my husband's late grandmothers suffered from obesity. Neither of them ever had diabetes. One lived to be 80 and the other lived to be 95. One died of a stroke, and the other died peacefully in her sleep, despite having chronic heart failure for many years. All of my former patients who were obese had heart disease, and some were diabetics. But, even thin people sometimes get Type II DM.

There is an extremely high rate of obesity where I live. It's very sad, and while I have found a way to stay fit and trim, I realize that it's very difficult for other people to maintain a healthy weight Humans in the Western world have never had so much access to so many high calorie foods. And, as you probably know, obesity is a huge risk factor for complications of COVID. Some people simply have no understanding of basic nutrition or what a normal portion size is these days.
 
well, I am currently 300 grams overweight (BMI=25.1)
Though, waist/height ratio is normal.
My plan is to get to BMI=23 and wear a pair 20 year old shorts again, they are practically new :)
 
No one has the glycocalyx on their radar?

It has to be the most important overlooked aspect about obesity, high bp, diabetes and covid.

gr3_lrg.jpg
 
barbos said:
well, I am currently 300 grams overweight (BMI=25.1)
Though, waist/height ratio is normal.
My plan is to get to BMI=23 and wear a pair 20 year old shorts again, they are practically new :)
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Waist (at the belly button) to height ratio is probably more important. Mine is about 0.53 should be 0.5 or below.

People can lose muscle mass which can drop the BMI. Skinny, weak fat.
 
I'm not educated enough in this area to know enough about how COVID can damage Glycocalyx, but it does appear that scientists are carefully considering this as a reason why older adults and those with Hypertension, Diabetes, obesity and COPD may have damage to their Glycocalyx from the virus. Understanding that it happens is one thing. Finding ways to prevent this damage may be difficult or impossible.

Some of these diseases are genetic. My husband has had hypertension since his early 30s, but it's always been well controlled. HIs mother also had HTN for most of her life. I don't know what you can do about genetics.


https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33032965/
 
barbos said:
https://www.cell.com/cell-stem-cell...m/retrieve/pii/S1934590920306020?showall=true

ApoE4, a strong genetic risk factor for Alzheimer disease, has been associated with increased risk for severe COVID-19. However, it is unclear whether ApoE4 alters COVID-19 susceptibility or severity, and the role of direct viral infection in brain cells remains obscure.
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Alzheimer linked to COVID-19
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I've read about something like that awhile ago. From what I've read about AD in the past, it's early onset AD that has a strong genetic link. I only scanned your link, as it was pretty in-depth. Was the conclusion that those who have the genetic link for AD, more likely to have complications from COVID or that those with the genetic link will have symptoms of AD following their infection?

I read about several people who were in their 30s and 40s who suffered from severe short term memory impairment following a severe bout of COVID. One was a medical professional who had to quit her job as she couldn't remember anything for more than a few minutes. The article that I read said it wasn't known whether these symptoms were temporary or permanent.
 
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