“Cytokine Storm” Debunked: Machine Learning Exposes Killer of Covid-19 Patients | Hacker News Reader

“Cytokine Storm” Debunked: Machine Learning Exposes Killer of Covid-19 Patients

scitechdaily.com

19 pointsamichail28 comments

Early COVID-19 research found that most patients with optimum levels of vitamin D did not require ICU or breathing assistance and survived the infection. This link doesn't relate to the research but is relevant. https://scitechdaily.com/study-finds-vitamin-d3-important-fo...

>most patients with optimum levels of vitamin D did not require ICU or breathing assistance and survived the infection.

Most patients survived Covid regardless of their vitamin D levels

> Early COVID-19 research found that most patients with optimum levels of vitamin D did not require ICU or breathing assistance and survived the infection.

Some sources point out that only 10-20% cases of covid are admitted to intensive care unit, and 80-90% of cases are mild.

I seriously doubt that up to 90% of the population has "optimum levels of vitamin D".

>Some sources point out that only 10-20% cases of covid are admitted to intensive care unit

There have been at least 100 million confirmed cases of Covid in the US. Do you believe 20 million people stayed in the ICU with Covid?

You can’t reverse an implication like that. “Most patients with X did not require Y” is not the same thing as “most patients who did not require Y had X”.

The sample seems to be from one hospital.

> The study analyzed 585 patients in the intensive care unit (ICU) at Northwestern Memorial Hospital

Generalizing that to every hospital in the country or the world seems a bit hasty, to say the least, so "debunks" is clickbait. Of course the "contrarians" lapped it up. Personally, my takeaway is to avoid Northwestern Memorial Hospital.

I'll comment again on this - if the cytokine storm is "debunked", why did dexamethasone have such a positive effect on survival rate (as it's an immune system/inflammations suppressant). This, coupled with how ventilated patients were situated in bed increased survival rates. Recall, for the first few months "reefer trucks with dead people" keep appearing in the news, which sorta spurred trying literally anything that could keep people alive.

Fortunately, some existing meds worked, vaccines and treatments appeared with amazing speed and the virus's mutations worked in our favour. And Omicron eventually appeared.

>some existing meds worked

Which?

Dexamethasone, for one. Might be others in that category as I forget all that went down in early 2020 regarding all of the anti-immune drugs that were tried. There's been a tremendous large and small molecule increase in such things and they'd be ignored if they showed something but less than the cheap/old steroid. It was a "throw against wall and hope it sticks" time. Googling finds literature articles discussing such things, but "steroid + rapid vaccines + rapid mutation" made it less interesting considering clinical trials of guesses and possibilities.

They had a virus sequence almost immediately which enabled various types of vaccines to start development. In my wife's case, possibly coincidentally, lung inflammation/shortness of breath went away with the first vaccine doses. Can't be sure re: long covid as we had no test saying it was covid back then.

> The investigators found nearly half of patients with COVID-19 develop a secondary ventilator-associated bacterial pneumonia.

This seems to imply that usage of ventilators promotes the development of bacterial pneumonia.

VAP (ventilator associated pneumonia) is a known morbidity of mechanical ventilation. ICU protocols are much improved these days to combat it (oral hygiene, suctioning, early extubation protocols etc).

That‘s ancient knowledge.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1592694/

Why did it take almost four years to learn this?

???

The over-eager use of ventilators was basically a death sentence for hundreds of thousands of people.

Isn't this difficult to conclude?

If a patient requiring a ventilator has 100% chance of dying without, or 50% chance of dying from secondary bacterial pneumonia. Then while it is true the use of ventialtors lead to deaths, it doesn't mean it caused more deaths than without

That's only true if you are limited to two options

Once you get to needing to be intubated, you pratically only have the one

Covid patients we thought needed to be intubated, didn’t. The science had to change and eventually we stopped killing Covid patients by putting them on vents.

https://www.statnews.com/2020/04/08/doctors-say-ventilators-...

> That's only true if you are limited to two options

What other options do you think there are?

And consider that you're already talking about people which are fainting and suffocating.

>you're already talking about people which are fainting and suffocating.

No. Many Covid patients have blood oxygen levels so low they should be dead (into the 70s and even lower). But they’re not gasping for air, their hearts aren’t racing, and their brains show no signs of blinking off from lack of oxygen. They did not need vents- their pulse ox levels were misleading.

https://www.statnews.com/2020/04/08/doctors-say-ventilators-...

It seems you are confused. You're pointing out observations from the very onset of the COVID pandemic, which were immediately adopted as policy.

This is stuff that precedes other policies like placing ICU patients prone/lying face down to improve breathing.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8864017/

It makes absolutely no sense at all to fabricate conspiracy theories based on the assumption that everyone in the world was systematically subjected to a procedure which was rejected right from the start.

Not sure what you mean by over-eager. Patients are only intubated and placed on mechanical ventilation when they will die otherwise. There is a step wise increase in ventilatory support in these cases, starting at a nasal cannula, then increasing to face mask, then a positive pressure (CPAP) mask, and then if they are still hypoxic or hypercarbic - intubation is the next step.

In the early days of Covid, hospitals were seeing pulse ox levels so urgently low (70s and lower) that they put many patients on vents much sooner than they normally would. The protocols were quickly changed once we realized vents harmed Covid patients more than they helped… but not before thousands died on them.

Here is an article from 2020 discussing the problem https://www.statnews.com/2020/04/08/doctors-say-ventilators-...

This kind of comment makes me genuinely angry. It's exact opposite. Repeating this lie led to painful death.

My wife is an ICU physician. I traveled with her around the country during the COVID pandemic to help provide moral support for what was a very difficult job. One of the most common, heart breaking stories were the patients who were wrongly told by their friends or the internet they were going to die if they were intubated. Now, it is your right to refuse intubation just as it is your right to refuse resuscitation. That said, my wife would recommend intubation if it was warranted and these patients would flat refuse because of information like this. Then, she would watch them slowly and painfully decompensate day by day. Weaker and weaker. Then, when they were at death's door, they would universally reverse their refusal of intubation and ask her to do everything. At this point, my wife would hold their cell phone while they video chatted their husbands, and wives, and parents, and children. Tell them how much they loved them. Then, they would crash and my wife would frantically try to intubate them and keep them alive. At this point, they had no reserves. Most of them died.

No physician in their right mind recommends intubation without cause. It's a procedure. It carries risk. However, it is vastly easier to do in a controlled setting before someone has no reserves and is crashing. It means that they could give the patients lungs a break, so they can heal.

I listened to these stories day after day after day and tried to support my wife as best as I could. Physicians are not perfect. They do make mistakes. They also have vastly more experience dealing with the intricacies of care. That said, comments like this one absolutely killed people. People who didn't need to die. That was and still is wrong.

Sadly if you look back through this person's comment history you'll find as bad or worse. I personally am of the opinion that HN is no place for these kind of comments, but day by day they're out there fighting the good fight around here. It makes me sad to see that no amount of comments like yours appear to prevent this human from continuing their crusade here of comment-thread closed-minded misinformation-laden horse-shit.

What you're describing is clearly extremely strongly felt.

Nevertheless, there is a growing body of evidence that the use ventilators is linked to excess mortality:

https://www.jci.org/articles/view/170682

You didn't need machine learning to let people know that it was mostly pneumonia, just common sense. These results are still good news, though, as it does provide further confirmation to what was already really obvious from the very beginning. The pseudoscientists in the pseudoscientific field of virology just slapped a label of Covid 19 to anything that shared similar symptoms to any winter associated illness prior to the religious fake Covid 19 hysteria, including pneumonia.

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