Week 4 coronavirus updates

More rapid test kits are being developed and tested and soon we will be able to know more promptly if someone has the virus. We have test kits for Quest and Labcorp in the office. To date Quest has been getting us results within a few days. Abbot just announced an in-office test, and we will be checking on our ability to provide that service in the office immediately.

Several deaths have been reported from people eating chloroquine used to clean their aquariums. Don’t be that person!! Chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine are not without serious potential side effects in carefully measured pharmaceutical compounds. Who knows what goes into aquarium chloroquine preparations!!?

Having said that it appears the FDA has approved chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine for treatment despite their lack of evidence of effectiveness. This appears to be a result of the FDA “fast-tracking” medications that may be beneficial but have yet to be proven so. If you get sick and are hospitalized, then you will likely get one of these as part of your treatment.

The latest semi-false information is that UV light kills the virus. Actually it does kill the virus, but after literally frying your skin to get enough UV light to kill the virus. Certain spectrum of the UV range is used to sterilize surfaces and even water, but not humans.

A new treatment has been approved by the FDA to use the plasma from people who have recovered from their coronavirus infection to infuse in those who are severely ill. This infuses antibodies to the coronavirus into the sick individual. This type of therapy has been tried in several previous epidemics and not been shown to be consistently helpful. Ongoing studies are underway to assess its effectiveness. If found to have significant benefit, then donating your plasma after your infection could be a great way to help others.

Data from China shows that 85% of COVID-19 infections were undetected due to people having only mild symptoms. If these individuals continued social interactions but never knew they were infected, then many more people were at risk for contracting the infection. This supports the hopeful benefit of social- and physical-distancing and the need for more testing.

Similarly, an article from the pediatric literature showed that of 34% of 2,143 children tested in high risk areas of China were laboratory confirmed for COVID-19. More than 90% of these pediatric patients had no symptoms or experienced only mild or moderate disease.

[I mention the two Chinese studies to show that many people can contract the illness and get over it. Even in the setting of fairly wide-spread disease, only about 1/3 of children contracted the illness. That does not mean this virus cannot be deadly. We certainly know otherwise. I just wished to add a broader perspective.]

What about vaccine protection? First, there’s no vaccine that is proven effective yet. Hopefully there will be one around the corner with so many people working on it and several vaccine trials in progress. We don’t yet know how effective a potential vaccine will be, in terms of what percentage of people who get the vaccine will be prevented from getting the infection. We also don’t know how long the immunity from the vaccine will last. Some currently available vaccines appear to convey life-long immunity. But the influenza vaccine must be administered yearly, because immunity only lasts about 6 months from the vaccine.

In general a vaccine is considered very effective if it prevents the infection 90% of the time. We’ll be hope a coronavirus vaccine will be found with that level of effectiveness, although any level of effectiveness would be welcome.

Dr. Gipson