@thevfmaddict
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The dates are also in my book an absolute must have. Not only are they high in anti-oxidants and fibre they also have very high magnesium content, with being a food, very high bioavailability. Half a cup has over 30mg of Mg plus good levels of potassium also. They are one fruit that retains pretty much all of its benefits even when dried. But dates do have something of the Marmite love or hate divide about them. Fortunately they mix very well with nuts just as raisins do and the nuts also contain a lot of magnesium. So if one is not keen on dates this mix acts as a good disguise. Dates are very cheap in B&M stores at about 40p a tray and that’s under half the price you will pay elsewhere.
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During the Covid-19 Epidemic I will be wearing a mask and goggles while posting so that if I become infected I won't spread it to you.
South Korea very rapidly losing control. South Korea announces 52 new COVID19 cases overnight alone, bringing the total number of infections in the country to 156. South Korea’s president states “It’s a very severe situation” referring to the rapidly fast spreading COVID-19 outbreak.
As usual not a mention on the BBC website. Still not sure how much of this is down ro pressure from HMG and how much is a case of not wanting to be clearly the one that fired the Panic Buying Starting Gun. Probably a bit of both.
The nature of one new case in Canada – the woman had recently returned from Iran – also suggests that Iran might indeed be raked with the virus. One experts I read, can’t remember where, said that given the 9 deaths Iran admits to already he couldn’t see how there could be less than 2,000 infected in Iran and there are probably far, far more. Iraq has restricted travel with Iran.
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During the Covid-19 Epidemic I will be wearing a mask and goggles while posting so that if I become infected I won't spread it to you.
I am particularly concerned by the CFR (Case Fatality Rate) of 2.3% seen in China. The UK’s population has a significantly older profile and with age generally comes far more co-existing medical conditions. I would therefore anticipate the CFR to be higher in the UK than in China due to age and co-morbidities.
As I said earlier when you mentioned taking zinc, adequate levels of such are vital because zinc plays a critical role in ensuring that our immune systems don’t over-react; which as your link also states is often the cause of a considerable amount of the damaging inflammation to our respiratory tract. My full preparatory supplement regimen for information includes Vitamin C, Magnesium, Zinc, Vitamin D and Iron (the latter being vital for the production of haemoglobin) and Omega 3 oil capsules. Yes, it is true that a healthy diet should provide all of such but if we end up in lock-down and with massive shortages in the shops then none of us will be eating healthily, will we? So ensuring adequate levels of those 6 ‘must haves’ by supplementing whatever non-perishable canned or packaged foods that we will in significant part be obliged to survive on, is prudent. Two non-perishable food stuffs that are particularly worth adding ready for any lock-down or shortages periods, simply because they are very high in vital anti-oxidants, are tinned prunes and dates. Of course doing all of such cannot guarantee survival but sure as heck deficiency in any of those required vitamins and minerals will definitely reduce one’s chances of making it through if one becomes infected. The Zinc and Magnesium is available and cheapest at Sainsbury’s and the rest available and cheapest at Lidl.
My biggest concerns once this hits will be visiting places at which the unwell will gather; Hospitals, GP surgeries and Pharmacies. Luckily my other half has no (vital) hospital appointments in the next 3 to 4 months; our GP takes repeat script requests by email and I know the quietest times at our local pharmacy to which the scripts are sent electronically by the GP. Its 10 seconds after they open in the morning. So I can limit my time in high risk zones to no more than a couple of minutes each month when picking up my other half’s fulfilled scripts from our local pharmacy. I’m lucky in that respect.
All in all I’m pretty much kitted and ready right now well before the panic and shortages start. Moreover I’d much rather not have to fight over the last pack of powered milk or toilet rolls, so its all done well in time; except for just a few beers perhaps. I’ll sort that tomorrow. 😀
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During the Covid-19 Epidemic I will be wearing a mask and goggles while posting so that if I become infected I won't spread it to you.
Infected Covid-19 victims seem at extreme risk of sudden death in Iran. Far more so it seems than anywhere else on the planet. Now 9 very rapid deaths it seems. The cynic in me can’t help but suspect that the most effective life sustaining treatment for Covid-19 sufferers in Iran might possibly be a bullet proof vest. That or Iran has been raked with the virus for weeks and only declares an individual as positive minutes or seconds before they take their last breath.
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During the Covid-19 Epidemic I will be wearing a mask and goggles while posting so that if I become infected I won't spread it to you.
You may have read something such as is said in this tweet to explain folks falling down suddenly in China. It is total carp.
ARD and Heart Failure do not develop instantly expect in cases of drowning or when someone inhales their one’s own vomit or is mechanically suffocated. Even a severe case of Covid-19 (new or re-infection) would not be so instant. A person who develops ARD and HF while going about their business would invariably have deteriorated over a few days or at least a few hours. And before such a collapse (as is seen in many China videos) would ever occur the person would already have been predominantly immobile and most likely already in medical care. Unlike a Heart Attack, Heart Failure is a slow process except in the suddenly traumatic circumstances I mentioned above.
It might well be that re-infection is possible with this virus and also that such does result in a more severe infection and worse prognosis. But it would not precipitate these sudden collapses effectively out of the blue and if it did certainly not by an ARD of HF mechanism. I can’t help but suspect that any and all collapses seen in the Far East under current circumstances get filmed and automatically blamed on Covid-19 even though they are caused in reality by faints, heart attacks or strokes totally unrelated to this virus.
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During the Covid-19 Epidemic I will be wearing a mask and goggles while posting so that if I become infected I won't spread it to you.
If he supplied some following such then you plainly sold him on the rationale being sound. I would bet a pound to a penny that as a result he’s ordered in for himself by now. That’s pretty much the way it was with my pharmacist although having had many dealings with me before over 20 years and knowing my background I’m sure she was expecting that my rationale would indeed be robust.
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During the Covid-19 Epidemic I will be wearing a mask and goggles while posting so that if I become infected I won't spread it to you.
This guy is probably bang on the money. This study reports high presence of the virus in anal swabs. It could be the sanitation system in the Diamond Princess that is the culprit for the high infection rate.
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During the Covid-19 Epidemic I will be wearing a mask and goggles while posting so that if I become infected I won't spread it to you.
I agree 100% re the pneumonia jab. It reduces the chance of getting a bacterial pneumonia by just over 40% which is worth doing; and the chances of developing a secondary bacterial pneumonia during a viral Covid-19 pneumonia are quite high. Don’t forget to get one’s flu jab as well because a normal flu can probably co-exist with Covid-19 making matters worse.
Free access to both jabs on the NHS is not merely limited to OAPs; numerous medical conditions entitle one to those jabs irrespective of age. Even if you are normally healthy with no illnesses you are also entitled to such free if you are someone’s Carer. Lastly, even if you fit none of those categories you can still get both jabs at a pharmacy OTC; for a combined free of about £100 IIRC.
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During the Covid-19 Epidemic I will be wearing a mask and goggles while posting so that if I become infected I won't spread it to you.
The virus is starting to get a significantly increasing foothold in South Korea and Japan; both in circumstances where it is probable that the identified infected also infected significant numbers themselves. Both countries are reaching levels where full potential onward tracking will soon be impossible. Can’t help but wonder what the situation is in NK? Guess we all know that Fat Boy Kim will take extraordinary measures with probably a far higher fatality rate than the virus itself if it ever begins to spread there !!!
Taiwan also looks on the brink of losing control. 1 new case in Taiwan, bringing the total to 24 but the source of infection for this latest case has not been traced. It would appear this case may have been community acquired. However, it would seem probable that she herself spread the virus extensively. She is a 60-year-old woman with no travel history abroad in the last two years. She had a fever and cough on Jan. 22, went to the clinic four times and was diagnosed with common cold and other diseases. Her symptoms worsened with shortness of breath and she was diagnosed with pneumonia on Jan. 29, hospitalized on Jan. 30, transferred to the intensive care unit on Feb. 10. As she is only just a new case we must assume she would have been previously tested but false negatives occurring until now.
Singapore is competing with Japan also with 84 cases fior third place after South Korea (104) and China.
Net conclusion is surely that anyone who goes anywhere near any Far East country at present needs not only their blood tested on their return but also their brains.
PS. After the two very recent positives in Iran who both quickly died, there are today three more positives there; two in Qom and one in Arak.
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During the Covid-19 Epidemic I will be wearing a mask and goggles while posting so that if I become infected I won't spread it to you.
The two patients positively tested today in Iran have died of the condition. Most unusual to die so quickly of Covid-19 and very fortunate for Iran because if one dies and is incinerated almost immediately then the risk of infecting others approaches zero. Can’t help but wonder if this virus is more deadly and clever than we ever thought and has now learned how to use an AK-47.
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During the Covid-19 Epidemic I will be wearing a mask and goggles while posting so that if I become infected I won't spread it to you.
I expect the NHS per se is as ready as it could be given its limited manpower and real estate. The only further thing may be to stockpile drugs and other supplies and that will be down to the availability of supplies.
The big problem may well be in areas other than dealing with this virus. The vast majority of the world’s medical supplies including pharmaceuticals are now produced in China or India with the latter being reliant on base compounds with which to produce pharmaceuticals normally being sourced from China. The lost production time in China already means we are currently relying on our own stockpiles or on arrivals that were in transit before China shut down. So if you are critically reliant on medications then irrespective of whether you ever catch this virus you are already more likely than not to some degree be in imminent jeopardy.
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During the Covid-19 Epidemic I will be wearing a mask and goggles while posting so that if I become infected I won't spread it to you.
THIS HAPPENS SO FAR TODAY – 20 new cases in South Korea (51 total) – 10 new cases in Japan (84 total) – 79 new cases on Diamond Princess (621 total) – 3 new cases in Singapore (84 total) – First 2 presumptive cases in Iran (2 total) – 1 new case in Hong Kong (63 total)
and worst of all numerous reports of a Honduran woman today exhibiting full blown Covid-19 symptoms on landing home by plane. During January she visited China and Taiwan transiting via LA airport on her return flights. If tests are positive for the virus there is a high probability that she infected many at LA airport.
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During the Covid-19 Epidemic I will be wearing a mask and goggles while posting so that if I become infected I won't spread it to you.
Travellers from the far east all quite naturally provoke consideration by the authorities of their potential for bringing Covid-19 un-trackably to us.
But are the authorities truly considering incoming from North America where there have been 37 positives; Australia where there have been 15 and EU states where the total is already 35 confirmed positives across 7 western EU states plus Finland. As the number of states with confirmed cases grows one has to consider almost every plane or ship passenger and every Eurostar passenger as a possible entry vector. The number of EU lorry drivers alone entering each day would be impossible to vet and such a driver could alone spread the virus across the UK.
The public believing that we can keep free of any significant and un-trackable outbreak to me is an utterly preposterous state of affairs. I find it amazing how many I meet who are clinging to this forlorn hope and such individuals seem to currently be in the overwhelming majority at present.
Panic when it occurs is usually the result of people facing a situation for which they have not prepared. Having prepared and having a plan ready to action when the situation arises is probably the greatest inoculation there is against panic. As the military and Emergency services say – One’s training just kicks in. Just a thought, folks. Don’t be caught with your pants down.
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During the Covid-19 Epidemic I will be wearing a mask and goggles while posting so that if I become infected I won't spread it to you.
This study of a young symptomatic Thai lady published in the Lancet is very interesting. Her blood profile during hospitalisation is in the main unremarkable and her chest x-rays equally so. The later is not unusual because symptoms often significantly lead radiological findings. Equally her C-Reactive Protein (CRP) was not elevated such as to even suggest infection.
Her treatment was pretty much that used to treat a suspected lower respiratory tract bacterial pneumonia – i.e. a cephalosporin antibiotic, paracetamol and saline drip. No reason to suspect the cephalosporin antibiotic would have aided her body’s fight against this virus. It is clear that after an initial minor struggle her own immune system relatively rapidly won the fight. No idea what her blood Oxygen saturation was or if it her arterial blood gases were assayed. But given there is no mention of her needing oxygen or the concentration used I assume her SATS were far from cause for concern.
A patient such as this is (and in this case was not) at serious risk but nonetheless took up a bed, microbiology and histology lab resources and medical time (albeit that the latter would not have been huge), for 9 days. In other words even those with moderate symptoms levy a significant burden on a state’s care resources if they occur in numbers. Little more than a couple of thousand or so of such moderate cases in the UK would alone begin to dent NHS capacity significantly. Scary.
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During the Covid-19 Epidemic I will be wearing a mask and goggles while posting so that if I become infected I won't spread it to you.
I never can fathom the virus ancestry argument. To me it is without logic. One can take existing viruses and splice their DNA or RNA sequences, in the main, as one desires. Taking sequences from other already in existence sequences to construct a new entity makes sense. The splicing techniques are those used in gene therapy. Take a virus and splice in what you want delivered by that virus which is usually a gene sequence from a healthy person to correct a deficiency in a patient.
As for the usefulness of such a bio weapon, as might remotely be the case here; to me it seems to offer numerous advantages. Yes, it attacks predominantly the non-productive sector of a populous but it burdens the productive sector massively in providing care for the rest. Moreover, using a construction Lego-style that assembles sequences that might have occurred by chance means it has utterly perfectly credible deniability. You can’t never use conventional weapons deniably.
All that said I do still lean predominantly in the same direction as you and tend not to think this was manufactured as weapon or even as a stepping stone to a weapon; although it could have been constructed wholly innocently for research purposes. This information about the profiling of nations merely means that my lean in the same direction as yours is a little less marked than it was before.
BTW way hope your Avloclor arrives. Picked my Avloclor up yesterday afternoon – 20 tabs – and it goes into my last resort bundle.
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During the Covid-19 Epidemic I will be wearing a mask and goggles while posting so that if I become infected I won't spread it to you.
I truly am not generally into conspiracy theories but looking at the graph linked to in the above post it is impossible not to notice who would be most vulnerable to a Severe Flu-Like viral attack weapon given that in all flu epidemics it is typically the old that fall. Sitting right behind the top 12 at 13 is Russia which also would be very vulnerable to such a weapon.
If we can see and spot this it is very far from implausible that China might previously have spotted it and researched the development of such a weapon which then inadvertently escaped captivity. I am, I must admit, increasingly receptive to this, albeit unlikely but nonetheless genuine possibility.
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During the Covid-19 Epidemic I will be wearing a mask and goggles while posting so that if I become infected I won't spread it to you.
Death rates in China appear to be 2.3% at best estimate. Over 80% of deaths occur in those of 60 years of age or over. It follows quite logically that both the Covid-19 care burden and the death rates are likely to be substantially greater, as the pandemic develops, in countries with older populations.
Cutting to the chase – The 12 most vulnerable countries in the world appear to be the in rising order the USA, Australia and 10 European countries. We, the UK, are the sixth oldest population in the world. Greece sits at number 1 and Germany at number 2. If we take China as the baseline death rate at 2.3%, the UK rate could, using this crude but nonetheless plausible modelling, be China times approx 2.5, in other words 5.7%. Greece could be over 9%. I hope to god that such is not the case.
There are of course far more than a few caveats regarding this very basic and crude model. Most are tendered in the full thread and they are all food for thought See here includes graphic. But the bottom line is surely that the threat we are facing is very substantial indeed and many orders of magnitude greater than the very worst (normal) flu year which only has at worst a death rate of 0.1%.
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During the Covid-19 Epidemic I will be wearing a mask and goggles while posting so that if I become infected I won't spread it to you.
I am quite lucky as my pharmacist knows my background and training hence knows that I only ever make personal medical calls based on best available science and never rashly.
Yep, my envisaged use on this occasion is not licensed use. So one truly does have to check that neither one’s pre-existing conditions or concurrent meds would make its use dangerously unsuitable if one was visiting a malaria hotspot. Of course if it would be deemed safe for one if visiting a malaria hotspot then it is as safe for one period as is reasonable and is highly unlikely to do one any harm provided one sticks to the standard malaria dosage. In other words it is to all intents a relatively risk free strategy. For me the use trigger would be symptoms highly suggestive of Covid-19 in circumstances where the NHS was already too overburdened to provide care reasonably promptly.
If your pharmacist would dispense, as he or she is able to do without script, if you were going to a malaria hotspot, then that pharmacist is deeming that the compound would do you no harm at the malaria dosage.
Any Forumite going down this route might, as you suggest, find it useful to pose the request to the pharmacist as a request for Avloclor to provide protection from malaria during an overseas trip. But would do so at their own risk. I am not advocating this strategy for them rather I am just informing them of my own last resort self-care strategy to cope with the unusually dangerous circumstances that may very well arise.
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During the Covid-19 Epidemic I will be wearing a mask and goggles while posting so that if I become infected I won't spread it to you.
Did you manage to buy your chloroquine? Out of interest I looked on line and Lloyds Pharmacy stated it was prescription only!
No Lloyds are wrong. Plain Chloroquine Phosphate is most definitely not a ‘POM’. Although some combination products are POM, IIRC. I ordered some Avloclor (the most common brand of plain CP) through my local pharmacy and will be picking it up this afternoon. The pharmacist who I have known for over 20 years would have told me if it needed a ‘script. I haven’t checked but I suspect it may be a ‘P’ medicine meaning it can’t be sold except when approved by a qualified pharmacist for the patient. So perhaps Lloyd’s are playing totally to the book online where plainly they have not seen the patient. However, there are dozens of pharmacies out there online in the UK that will ship ‘P’ classed medicines without a second’s hesitation or once an automated questionnaire is completed.
As far as I know no anti-malarial whatsoever is on the NHS drug tariff for prophylactic use. So GP’s can only ever write a Private Script for such preventative treatments.
Just checked Avloclor is indeed a ‘P’ see here.
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During the Covid-19 Epidemic I will be wearing a mask and goggles while posting so that if I become infected I won't spread it to you.
Reviewing the Lancet piece one sees that Lymphopenia is a common manifestation of Covid-19 but the authors do not comment on the likely cause of such. Is Covid-19 directly attacking one’s immune system resulting in this lower than normal level of white blood cells to fight the virus? Or were patients’ immune systems always already severely compromised prior to infection. However, such is probably academic. Either way it remains that these patients’ immune systems was outgunned and less able to put up a fight. Inflammation of the lower respiratory tract develops without adequate check.
I note that the use of Chloroquine had not been routine. However, as it is now known it impedes progression of the virus to some degree antagonistically interfering with the ACE2 receptor attack vector of the virus; it may well be that Chloroquine will in many cases turn out to be the critical ‘leveller’. Meaning it compromises the pathological potential of the virus to such a degree as to allow the patient’s compromised immune system to fight on more equal terms.
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During the Covid-19 Epidemic I will be wearing a mask and goggles while posting so that if I become infected I won't spread it to you.
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