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Comment by tzs | Hacker News Reader

> [...] patients who received Paxlovid within five days of symptom onset [...]

I wonder how well it will do on people who are farther along in their COVID infection?

There are a lot of people who don't get vaccinated, don't take precautions to avoid COVID, dismiss their early symptoms either because they believe COVID isn't worse than a typical cold or flu or because they think that is probably what they have, just treat it at home with vitamins and ivermectin if they do anything at all about it, and don't end up going to a doctor or hospital until they are having so much trouble breathing they have to go to the emergency room.

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I wonder if having an effective oral antiviral readily available will result in someone who would have acted in the manner you suggest seeking this treatment instead.

My understanding is that other antivirals are much less effective after the first week or so of infection.

Why not just treat it at home with ivermectin if it works? It did for me for long covid.

Because theres no reason to believe it does. Firstly the study that Ivermectin-for-covid is based on in vitro(cell-in-petri-dish) studies of rhesus monkey liver cells[1]. Additionally. Rhesus monkeys have differing bodies sizes and in order to get an equivalent dose in humans would require overdosing on ivermectin, which can and has lead to death. Ivermectin targets the host nuclear transport importin α/β1 heterodimer in host tissue, exerting effects directly on cells of the human body.[2]

On top of this you refer to 'long covid' which has nothing to do with the covid virus itself. Long covid is the syndrome after a person gets over a covid infection. They're not entirely sure what causes it, but damage to internal organs and the venous system have been observed[3]. At this point there is no active viral infection in your system, inhibiting viral replication is basically irrelevant. There is absolutely zero reason, even according to the logic of ivermectin-for-covid, that ivermectin would treat that damage.

1- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC7129059/

2- http://dicyt.uto.edu.bo/observatorio/wp-content/uploads/2020...

3- https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/coronavirus/i...

Well it felt like I never really got over it. Aside from a brief period of fever, everything else stayed until ivermectin. Headache, fatigue, sob, cough, sense of smell issues, brain fog, all kinds of erratic heart problems. There's a lot of speculation that long covid results from the virus migrating into the body and organs where it persists. This makes sense with what I experienced. Symptoms I've never had before went away within hours and cleared up completely within days of starting it.

How would you determine if it was the ivermectin, coincidence, or the placebo effect?

(That's what the studies are for, and thus far, they've shown little sign of the effect you describe on statistically significant populations.)

It was three months of hoping it would get better with no movement. Then five hours later I could breathe again. So physical stuff happened. I get that placebo effect can do this but still. Coincidence would be rare and I don't think long covid resolves that way, been told it is more gradual. I've heard a lot of similar reports on a covid telegram channel I'm on, same with reddit before it got overrun with trolls. You can tell genuine discourse, especially when its the same people over several days going through the same experience.

None of this is scientific. What was is the safety on it so that made it low risk to try.

> Coincidence would be rare

It really isn’t.

Neither is the placebo effect.

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