Posted by alexandra_k on July 1, 2020, at 18:06:05
In reply to Re: how much time?, posted by alexandra_k on July 1, 2020, at 3:22:40
The trouble is that everyone who wants money for their research, right now, tries to connect their research to CoronaVirus.
Don't get me wrong -- sometimes breakthroughs come from a bit of lateral thinking... But not very often. Many of the connections are dubious, at best.
Don't get me wrong -- there is much that we don't know about the world and people are learning about interesting things that may prove really useful down the track.
And many of the public health upgrades (seems to me) are in similar vein.
For example, it was physicists working in fluid dynamics who showed how ''in theory'' CoronaVirus particles (let's say) could aerosolise from flushing the toilet with the lid up. That's to say that a thing of it's weight / size / shape (or something like that) could be thrown up into the air and inhaled by a person in a closed space.
Only there wouldn't be infectious CoronaVirus particles in the toilet, most likely. Because anything pooped out would have been inactivated (and also chopped up and also unencapsulated now with only fragments of CoronaVirus genome)...
But that's not to say that there is any shortage of OTHER viruses that do have fecal-oral transmission... I mean... It's probably a good idea to drop the lid on the toilet seat. But likely not anything to do with CoronaVirus...
I remember learning that people generally... Bodies are very robust, usually. People are harder to kill than you might suppose. The body has all these homeostatic mechamisms and feedback loops and the like... Much of the time treatment or therapy is merely or only 'supportive'. That's to say to monitor vital stats. To intervene if progress is 'worse, worse, worse, worse, worse, dangerous' and otherwise... Wait it out. The body will fix itself. Mostly. All you gotta do is try not to 'help' by making things worse.
So... There are a bunch of 'complications' or upsets to vital stats (e.g., blood pressure too high, oxygen saturation too low sorts of things) that require intervention until the body takes back over control of things...
And so most / many of the 'treatments' are about monitoring the trajectory of those stats and providing 'support' for things that are getting worse rather than better... Hoping that you don't throw things off course the other way. E.g., if the person is micro-clotting you might give them aspirin and maybe fancier more expensvie things to prevent the clots and you hope they don't start to bleed into the brain because you were too agressive in your bood thinning...
If they aren't getting enough oxygen then there could be lasting neurological (brain) damage. So you want to give them oxygen... If you start mechanically ventillating them (forcing their lungs to expand) then... Well... You might be rather too agressive on teh delicate filtration surface and cause lifelong lung damage...
Balancing pros and cons... Helps and harms...
For the good of the patient. Of course.
poster:alexandra_k
thread:1110894
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/poli/20200409/msgs/1111096.html