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How does the coronavirus kill?

sciencemag.org

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Re: How does the coronavirus kill?

#21

Post by e40 »

m0xte wrote: post #10

Interesting read. My father-in-law died of Covid-19 last week. The thing that got him in the end after a 9 day battle was kidney failure. He had heart problems and diabetes already as underlying conditions. There’s one thing I take away from all of this and that is to eat and live healthy to reduce the things working against you as you get older. Age is bad enough on its own.

NYT just has an article about kidney failure being a cause of death for COVID patients:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/18/health/kidney-dialysis-co...

Re: How does the coronavirus kill?

#22

Post by coldcode »

I wonder if there is something in your immune system, maybe genetic or your viral experience, that determines how well your body will cope with this new virus. There are reports of really old people (I read a 103 and 99 year old's stories) who recovered from a bout, yet my niece lost a 30 year old friend.

I guess its like debugging an app you have never seen and the source code is in a language you barely know; everything seems like a clue as to what is going wrong, yet much of what you think it's doing is simply a mystery because you don't understand enough.

Even in 2020 there are mysteries in the human body we simply don't understand yet.

Re: How does the coronavirus kill?

#23

Post by ramraj07 »

joezydeco wrote: post #20

Cameron Kyle-Sidell is a New York ICU doctor that has been trying to help figure out why treatments aren't working as expected. His videos are highly technical but interesting to watch. Kyle-Sidell believes it's a diffusion hypoxemia problem, leading to pulmonary edema (which is something you see in high-altitude sickness) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmRlvX3VrAQ&feature=youtu.be https://twitter.com/cameronks/stat…

The hypothesis suggested in the science article sounds more plausible - these patients are truly oxygen deprived, but potentially because of the vascular Nature of the infection, the typical gasping response is not initiated

Re: How does the coronavirus kill?

#24

Post by dharma1 »

Trasmatta wrote: post #6
nradov wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pulse oximeters measure the light absorbed by hemoglobin. So that's pretty much a direct measurement, I don't think it could be wrong. https://opentextbc.ca/vitalsign/chapter/why-is-pulse-oximetr...

When this first started popping off, I ordered one of them on Amazon. If I get it, it should help give me info on if / when I would need to go to the hospital.

Same here. You can get a fitness band that measures SpO2 among other things for 30 bucks or so

Re: How does the coronavirus kill?

#25

Post by ramraj07 »

coldcode wrote: post #22

I wonder if there is something in your immune system, maybe genetic or your viral experience, that determines how well your body will cope with this new virus. There are reports of really old people (I read a 103 and 99 year old's stories) who recovered from a bout, yet my niece lost a 30 year old friend. I guess its like debugging an app you have never seen and the source code is in a language you barely know; every…

This was very true for the H1N1 epidemic but it's not clear something like this is happening with Covid. If anything, the opposite might be happening where prior infection with a related virus makes the current infection much worse.

Re: How does the coronavirus kill?

#26

Post by wenc »

ajross wrote: post #14
usrusr wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couldn't there be a million other things that change light absorption?

Not inside a body, no. These aren't the most accurate tests (the big failure mode has nothing to do with the science, it's that the little clamp falls off the finger), but they are very mature technology with well characterized behavior. Basically everyone who's been under anaesthesia of any kind (even stuff like wisdom teeth removal) for the past 3-4 decades has had one of these on them. We know how they work.

I read that despite the simple measurement mechanism ("shine a light through a finger"), the accuracy is generally pretty high (+/- 2%). This document from the American Thoracic Society does state some corner cases though [1]. Quote:

"How accurate is the pulse oximeter?

The oxygen level from a pulse oximeter is reasonably accurate. Most oximeters give a reading 2% over or 2% under what your saturation would be if obtained by an arterial blood gas. For example, if your oxygen saturation reads 92% on the pulse oximeter, it may be actually anywhere from 90 to 94%. The oximeter reading may be less accurate if a person is wearing nail polish, artificial nails, has cold hands, or has poor circulation."

[1] https://www.thoracic.org/patients/patient-resources/resource...

Re: How does the coronavirus kill?

#27

Post by raverbashing »

usrusr wrote: post #8
Techasura wrote: post #2

I'm not a science person nor do I know how a virus kills a human body but this one is for sure something amazing. What we can't see can lead you to an absolute death destroying your whole body, it certainly is quite shocking. It's 2020 and we are still losing so many lives, yet we are still lucky to be alive because of the advancement in medicine and health care.

It's a virus that is completely unadapted to the human body, fresh off the boat from whatever animal it evolved on. It's like an early prototype medication: it already has the desired effect (reproduction in a body part that serves as a launch pad for transmission to other hosts), but it's chock-full off side effects. Unfortunately, it is so good at pre-symptomatic transmission that those side effects impose very lit…

If you compare it to MERS/SARS it is actually less harmful (at an individual level) than those. But of course this ends up meaning more harmful at a collective level since it takes a while for people to develop symptoms while still being able to infect other people.

Re: How does the coronavirus kill?

#28

Post by darkerside »

ramraj07 wrote: post #23
joezydeco wrote: post #20

Cameron Kyle-Sidell is a New York ICU doctor that has been trying to help figure out why treatments aren't working as expected. His videos are highly technical but interesting to watch. Kyle-Sidell believes it's a diffusion hypoxemia problem, leading to pulmonary edema (which is something you see in high-altitude sickness) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmRlvX3VrAQ&feature=youtu.be https://twitter.com/cameronks/stat…

The hypothesis suggested in the science article sounds more plausible - these patients are truly oxygen deprived, but potentially because of the vascular Nature of the infection, the typical gasping response is not initiated

Isn't it true that gasping is typically caused by CO2 profusion, not O2 deprivation?

Re: How does the coronavirus kill?

#29

Post by darkerside »

dharma1 wrote: post #24
Trasmatta wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When this first started popping off, I ordered one of them on Amazon. If I get it, it should help give me info on if / when I would need to go to the hospital.

Same here. You can get a fitness band that measures SpO2 among other things for 30 bucks or so

Most recent Samsung Galaxies have one built in. You just need to enable it in the Samsung Health app.

Re: How does the coronavirus kill?

#30

Post by visava »

ramraj07 wrote: post #7

Only one thing is clear about our immune system: it's extremely complex and even after a century of prodding it, we still don't know it well enough to prod it in targeted ways and know what to expect. Especially, suppressing the immune system is always dicey, since its not just one variable you tune up or down. However, there _is_ a magic bullet of sorts out there, Intravenous immunoglobulin (IVIG). IVIG is just conc…

A statistic that needs to be gathered is correlation between levels of Vitamin D,C,A B12 and deaths
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