Biomarker predicts severity of Covid-19 infection early on
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I wonder if this would correlate with date of infection vs date of testing. As in, a high expression of hFwe-Lose in the first N days after infection is a reliable indicator, but if the testing is done at a later stage, the baseline hFwe-Lose expression is higher in all patients and therefore no longer an adequate predictor. I wonder if there is a second biomarker that can provide an indication how long the infection has been progressing, and if they could correlate those two biomarkers?
The linked paper (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29263350) doesn't seem to mention this at all, perhaps because it's impossible to determine. Looking at the sensitivity-vs-selectivity charts, it may simply be that this biomarker by itself casts too wide a net.
The increased survival was simply due to getting more air at a critical time.
I had my dosage and timing down exactly to the minimum of what I needed to not have symptoms.
When I got covid I found I had to double up blood thinners for about six months to keep symptoms under control.
The second time I got covid I didn’t have to adjust anything.
So my option is tiny clots is a major part of covid, and some people are more sensitive then others.
https://labblog.uofmhealth.org/lab-report/new-cause-of-covid...
For some reason the virus also plays havoc with your blood sugar, so having even slight diabetes is a huge risk.
I was talking with a Covid nurse a couple of weeks ago (female, small thing) and she said a big part of the reason she's changing jobs is... the size of the patients she has to move around. Obesity is another huge risk factor - whether through diabetes, independent, or both.
by Michail Yekelchyk, Esha Madan, Jochen Wilhelm, Kirsty R Short, António M Palma,…, Rajan Gogna
https://www.embopress.org/doi/full/10.15252/emmm.202013714 (Open Access)
Per my shallow understanding (I only read the introduction to the paper), the marker hFwe-Lose is expressed by cells that are struggling, thus close to death. It's the precursor for apoptsis.
It makes sense to me that COVID affecting lung tissue would cause more apoptsis, thus more hFwe-Lose pushed out either through breath or mucus.
Is the 'news' here the discovery of the marker hFwe-Lose?
In other words, working out who is likely to become seriously ill early on is important for physicians to provide the correct level of care; they have a number of tools to perform this asssessment already; the news is that hFwe-Lose concentration seems to be better than the rest at predicting severe outcomes.
Personally I don't think it's blindingly obvious that biomarker levels early in the course of a disease should be so very highly predictive of patient outcomes late in the course of a disease, but I am also a layperson.
The problem then is, that we and the individuals affected know which group they are belonging to. This makes a very alienable experience. Imagine being one of these people, virtually every other person is radioactive to you.
What would be the societal and political implications of this? Lockdowns only for people who have this marker? I can imagine people wouldn’t want to make this test as it makes them turn paranoid, could we force people to make this test?
Looks like a psychiatric condition that needs a separate treatment.
The people who do this think they're geniuses, and literally say things like "we should push people to go to international conference again instead of giving Zoom talks", and so on.
In reality, everybody just projects their own preferences and fears onto others. The people pushing for hitherto unknown social events are extraverts, the people who prefer to stay home and give Zoom talks are introverts.
The bottomline is that there is nothing wrong with being an introvert and avoiding large crowds is quite reasonable even when you're fully vaccinated. (Less so if you recently got a booster shot, but e.g. in our country it will take a while until every adult has received one.) Infection numbers in our country are going up rapidly, with an R-value close to 2. Then, close to Christmas when measures have to be announced, everybody will act surprised again, of course.
It's even encouraged under the moniker of "social distancing" (which itself is a telling misnomer; "physical distancing" would've been a much more appropriate and less jarring term but somehow that never stuck), even though there have been better alternatives (getting vaccinated, getting tested when meeting with a larger group of people, wearing high-quality masks) for quite some time now.
While you're not wrong, this behaviour is already present - just randomly distributed. Some/many people withdraw, interact with fear, maybe eventually get fed up and take risks, based on guessing-games.
If this research proves fruitful, it will reduce the guesswork a lot, and people can try to find more practical and constructive approaches.
And this is exactly the reason why governments didn’t select for any factor in the first lockdowns and why the discussion about whether it is fair to exclude group X has merit - because while the effectiveness of such measures is high, the efficiency is not.
This would change the situation drastically. A government just tests the whole population on that marker and knows with a very high degree of confidence who is vulnerable.
There's an easy fix for these people: get vaccinated. Easy and free.
Forgive the joke, but this feels like a glass-half-empty take on something we're not fully understanding. I think we should look at numbers before determining whether or not the vaccine is a good strategy. Life involves risks.
Granted the data about vaccines efficacy was last updated end of July 2021, yet according to those numbers, I'm fairly sure the chances of getting hit by a bus are considerably lower. Also you can more easily avoid getting hit by a bus by looking both ways before your cross the street (freak bus accidents aside), whereas avoiding an invisible virus is slightly more difficult.
According to "usafacts.org" [1] there's a (very) roughly 1.6% rate of death, not controlling for age. The informationisbeautiful data shows that I'm >90% protected from extreme cases with 2 doses. That feels pretty safe to me given how low the rate of an extreme case is to begin with. (I'll admit I only measured death though)
You're right, though, it's not invincibility. That's a pretty high bar for anything.
[1] https://usafacts.org/visualizations/coronavirus-covid-19-spr...
The vaccine "makes you 25 years younger" so to speak. Meaning that it gives an 80 year old the COVID risk of a 55 year old, which is still pretty big.
But if you are old, COVID still remains very dangerous to you, even if vaccinated.
Just being 80 gives you a 10% annual chance of death, which climbs dramatically as you get towards 90.
Your risk tolerance automatically goes up as you age, even if you don't notice.
There are quite a few people who aren't getting vaccinated because they have doubts AND because they feel healthy and do not think they are at risk of a severe course of COVID-19 infection.
If their physician could tell them with confidence that the virus is very likely dangerous to them, that would maybe push them to getting vaccinated despite their doubts.
This stuff is hard. There are people that simply won't be convinced, no matter what. But anything to help sway the more reasonable "skeptics" out there is a win, I think.
Caveat: there is a lot more to this data than meets the eye, but public health policies appear to be driven by broad numbers, so for the purpose of the "how does the pandemic mode end" conversation these curves are a reasonable starting point.
https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...
Do you have some information that the researchers who performed this study don't?
If there happens to be structural damage before the explosion, sure, you can probably make similar inferences about danger after the explosion.
But the absence of structural damage before the explosion is not great evidence that it'll look like that afterwards. This is a biomarker of damaged lungs. Covid can be the thing that causes the damage on a clean slate.
edit: so to clarify, you can't test this to confidently state that someone will be fine with covid prior to infection. you might be able to identify some people that will definitely struggle but its likely that this information wouldn't be too surprising to them.
Many people start to do poorly only after they get the disease. I would also reckon that known comorbidities are likely to be a more reliable, significantly easier to measure predictive feature for estimating risk before they get covid.
I disagree here. People would want to know if they are at risk. For example in our local school system there has been 40 teachers who have tested positive and 230 students since school started this fall (2600 students in the district). Out of the confirmed positive cases we have had 0 severe cases. 0 hospitalizations with an average illness of around 3-5 days.
The amount of school activities missed due to contact tracing, exposure protocols has been immense. The constant stress of a scary pandemic weighs heavily on the community. Imagine if all students, staff and community members could be screened to see if they were vulnerable. Precautions could be made for this select group.
The overall health of the community and school system would improve drastically utilizing another tool to put the scope and danger of this pandemic in perspective.
Has been more or less spread across population. If only a known subset is affected, those will become disadvantaged and possibly even discriminated during employment.
I don't think this would be necessary. Vulnerable people can decide for themselves what precautions they wish to take. Lockdowns are to force _others_ to take precautions to protect the vulnerable.
It's a relatively rare condition some people have which is unfortunate for that population of people but this isn't unprecedented.
Do you put John Travolta in the bubble? Or do you put everyone in the bubble?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_force_microscopy#/media...
also a great example of why commercializing research is so difficult and expensive - to get something from looking like it's barely holding together with duct tape to being a sellable product is no small feat.
Anyway, that's one way having this marker might turn out to be useful - otherwise it only confirms what was already known, that patients with preexisting lung damage are more likely to have a severe case. Of course, patients or their doctors may not be aware of the lung damage or underestimate it, while the marker is more objective...
Ignoring policy for the moment.
It would be cool to know in advance if say whooping cough (for example) would hit me hard or not. If the price of detection could be driven down it would be better than having to store or produce expensive vaccines or treatments for people who won't significantly benefit from either. Hope that tech like this actually takes off :)
If you are asking about the medical context, at least for me in particular, I have a close relationship with the local hospital and access to people who have the knowledge which would make this data useful. (In fact, the same people who advised me to be very careful about sending off my DNA overseas - advice I'm very glad I took)