good morning I worked a shift last night and before I go to bed I do want to record a video
on covid 19 give you guys an update on the novel coronavirus disease covid 19 is now a pandemic
but before I get into that I do want to take the time to say thank you to all of you who've
left positive comments on my previous videos I do appreciate you a lot of you are asking some
great questions into our wants certain topics covered and I've been working hard to get this
out for you so in the upcoming videos I'll be answering those questions the best that I
can but for today's video I want to start out by saying yes unfortunately covid 19 is now a
pandemic even though it's not official based on what the w-h-o is not quite saying it's
pandemic yet but by all intents and purposes this is now a pandemic the w-h-o already has
a credibility problem with a lot of people and that's only going to get worse the longer they
delay call on covid 19 a pandemic the reason this is a pandemic is because the endemic is now
spreading in different countries specifically there's sustained transmission from person to
person and people who have not recently been to China or have not been exposed to someone who
was recently in China of course we know about the 80,000 or so cases in Asia with China South Korea
and even Iran still being part of Asia but the big news is the number of cases in Italy also
more in the US but most of those US ones in San Antonio are ones who were repatriated from the
Diamond Princess cruise ship but the big news that is really considered to be making this a
pandemic now is the new cases that are going on in Italy with over 200 new cases that have developed
over the past three days or so so right now as I'm recording this video the date is February 25th the
time is 6:53 a.m. so there are 80,000 289 total cases as of right now total deaths 2,700 for I
think there's about 20 to 30 deaths outside of mainland China right now you look at Italy 270
this has gone up significantly it was essentially single digits three or four days ago and now it's
270 and I think there's around ten deaths in Italy most of the cases in Italy are in the
Lombardy in veneto areas authorities have closed down twelve towns as they try to stop the virus
from spreading and it's still a mystery as to who patient zero is in Italy which makes it harder
to track and stop the outbreak there they've cancelled sports games they've closed schools
universities restaurants tourist attractions even a movie theater so it's gotten to the point where
we can no longer contain the virus we can only hope to slow it down part of the reason why you
can't contain the SARS coronavirus - that's the name of this new virus is because we know that
it spreads and infected people who don't have symptoms this has been proven in at least three
different published studies in reputable medical journals two of those have been published in the
very credible New England Journal Medicine and the other was published in JAMA also another credible
journal then also there's another study where they reported 800 cases of asymptomatic patients in the
largest study so far based on 70,000 cases this was done in the Chinese Journal of Epidemiology
although I don't know the credibility of that journal now from an individual standpoint the
best thing to do would be the same thing you do to prevent the flu the only difference being there's
no vaccination for a Covid 19 so this entails frequent hand-washing avoid touching your face
without washing your hands first avoiding sick people and make sure you disinfect commonly-used
surfaces masks and other personal protective equipment like gloves may or may not be beneficial
depending on the circumstances I did make a whole video dedicated towards this called should you
air mask so other things that you want to do to make sure your immune system is running at full
capacity includes things like eating healthy exercising getting good sleep and not smoking
and what about vitamin C I know some of you had questions about that there have been many studies
looking at vitamin C with its potential to prevent respiratory viral infections like colds and flu
but there hasn't been any convincing evidence that it does so there was one study that said it may be
beneficial for people exposed to brief periods of severe physical exercise but that's it and
there's a potential downside to taking vitamin C because it increases oxalate excretion in the
urine therefore increases the risk of kidney stones in the highest quality study looking at
this there is a cohort study of over 23,000 men who had not already had kidney stones and were
following up for 12 years and men taking vitamin C but not taking any other supplements were twice
as likely to develop kidney stones compared to men taking no vitamin supplements so with covid
19 the ones who become critically ill are the ones who are developing ARDS acute respiratory
distress syndrome there were a couple of studies done on septic patients who had ARDS and were
given vitamin C now of no these were not covid 19 patients very ARDS was a result of different
infections specifically bacterial sepsis but regardless they wanted to see if vitamin C would
help them in one trial of over 165 patients in another trial with over 200 patients it failed to
show any benefit of vitamin C for ARDS so based on the previous studies done on vitamin C it seems
unlikely that vitamin C would be beneficial for covid 19 so we talked about different ways to
prevent Covid 19 now let's talk about different drugs that are being looked at to treat covid 19
there are several investigational drugs being explored to act on the virus that causes covid 19
specifically the SARS coronavirus too - so Remdesivir is a new drug that has activity against
the virus in vitro meaning in a test tube but also has activity against the virus and animal studies as
well right now there's a randomized clinical trial in China to evaluate the efficacy and
safety of remedy severe it's already been used at one case of Covid 19 in a state of Washington so
this was given as a compassionate use in that case compassionate use of a new medicine this is where
doctors have to apply for in order to give it on a case-by-case basis that patient survived but it's
unknown if he would have survived regardless to know if it truly works or not we have to wait for
these clinical trials to finish up earlier this month the Wuhan Institute of biology filed an
application seeking a new patent on Remdesivir there's also the combined protease inhibitor
low pinna via retina vert which is used for the treatment of HIV infection this combined drug has
activity against the old SARS virus and the MERS virus the use of this drug for covin nineteen has
been described in case reports but its efficacy is unclear and it's being a value evaluated in
larger randomised trials if you see my video on the autopsy findings of the patient who died of
covid 19 that patient did receive LaPenta via right on of ear among other drugs but that was
just one case so like remedy severe we have to wait for clinical trials to see if it works or not
early data from 10 clinical trials being performed in china has revealed that the anti-malarial drug
chloroquine has fairly good efficacy against covid 19 it's been reported to improve fever improve the
ground glass opacity seen on the chest CT scans and has been shown to have shorter recovery times
but we don't have good access to that data to these studies because they're being done in
China reportedly there haven't been any adverse effects from chloroquine in these trials february
r is another antiviral drug and is currently in a 70 patient clinical trial in china and finally
the use of drugs that treat blood pressure are being looked at to treat covid 19 pacifically
the angiotensin receptor blockers Telma Sartain and losartan so lots of cells in our body have
this enzyme called angiotensin converting enzyme there's actually one and there's two so these ace
two enzymes are located on epithelial cells they're located on the cells of the lungs
this enzyme is responsible for constricting our blood vessels which raises our blood pressure now
these antihypertensive drugs losartan and telomere start in act to block this enzyme from working and
that's why it lowers the blood pressure let's say this arm is a alveoli it's a cell okay and then
this is the enzyme on the cell called angiotensin converting enzyme now let's say this is the virus
this arm is a virus and this is the motif of the virus well the virus gains entry at this enzyme
location so if you give a medication like losartan or telma Sartain well that site is already gonna
be preoccupied so that virus motif can no longer bind there can no longer gain entry into the cell
there's also some unpublished observation that people who take these losartan and Telma Sartain
medications are less prone to getting colds so with these observations the thought is maybe we
can give these ACE inhibitors to people with covid 19 but we need clinical trials so to conclude this
video like I said earlier in the video I think that we're past the point of containing the virus
at this point we have to do our best to slow it down if we can slow it down we can help to
flatten out the curve of cases that occurs right now what we don't want is for there to be a big
spike in cases instead we'd rather have it go not quite as high and more flat of a curve that way we
don't overburden the healthcare system because about 10 percent of patients who get the novel
coronavirus end up in the intensive care unit and so it's better to have those cases spread out more
of a flatter curve than to have that spike in the curve also by slowing it down it buys some
more time for more research and development for antiviral medications and vaccinations now in
the upcoming videos I'm going to address a lot of the questions that have come up with that
said my focus and experience is really on the medical aspect of things so when it comes to
questions about where did the virus come from the credibility of China's numbers the politics
involved these are topics too I don't know enough about so I'm not gonna focus on these things but
the questions aim towards medical topics that's what I'm gonna tackle in the next video so if
you want to see you in my next video comes out hit that Bell and I'll see you in the next one