The past 48 hours or so have seen a huge revelation: COVID-19 causes prolonged and progressive hypoxia (starving your body of oxygen) by binding to the heme groups in hemoglobin in your red blood cells. People are simply desaturating (losing o2 in their blood), and that’s what eventually leads to organ failures that kill them, not any form of ARDS or pneumonia.
Question: has any surveys been done on COVAD-19 victims to verify that SpO2 levels are depressed? If so, to what level? Particularly, what about people with asymptomatic COVAD-91 infections
Given these assumptions – and they are assumptions at this stage -- we may have an answer to easier preliminary screening at low cost. Current methods of screening for COVID-19 infections involved complicated testing, testing that takes time. Even 15 minutes may be too long, given the number of tests needed to perform widespread screening. If we can use pulse-oximeters in conjunction with thermometers to detect infections in their early stages – before the patient exhibits symptoms or worse – we would have a good tool to knock down this pandemic and get us all back working in the economy.
I’m not a doctor.
>75 is really low. I’m supposed to have COPD and 6 months of testing daily mine never dropped below 94.
One of the vital signs every patient gets is a pulse oximeter reading. We get concerned about readings below about 93 %.
So every patient gets that checked on pretty much any visit to a doctor.
people are contagious well before SpO2 affected.
Many contagious never will have it affected, minor and asymptomatic cases.
There was an article that showed up on WebMD that illustrates the confusion.
“One doctor treating COVID-19 patients in New York says it was like altitude sickness. It was “as if tens of thousands of my fellow New Yorkers are stuck on a plane at 30,000 feet and the cabin pressure is slowly being let out.
These patients are slowly being starved of oxygen,” said Cameron Kyle-Sidell, MD, an emergency room and critical care doctor at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn who has been posting about his experience on social media.”
https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20200407/doctors-puzzle-over-covid19-lung-problems
“Question: has any surveys been done on COVAD-19 victims to verify that SpO2 levels are depressed?”
I don’t know about surveys but that’s the main thing they’re looking for.
I recall reading one freeper hypothesized that part of the reason the elderly and immunocompromised were struggling is because the medications they were taking caused low iron. I began to wonder if somehow this virus was binding up a person’s iron so not enough oxygen could be transported through their blood stream. I called my 82 year old mom and told her to start taking an iron supplement just in case.
Anything under 92 isn’t all that good. Mid to high 90s is good. 100 ideal
I read this study as well and wondered if taking extra iron would help or increase the susceptibility to the virus? Does anyone know?
I read the linked posting from Medium.com yesterday. It made a lot of sense to me, and I forwarded it to several friends. However, I have a couple of misgivings. In the middle of the posting, the author gives a long quote from what sounds like a research paper, but gives no link or other info on where he is quoting from. When I tried to click on the comments to the Medium.com posting, I go to a notice that the article has been removed. Medium lets a lot of people post, and the postings often slant left. That their mods removed something is no evidence that what they removed was false.
I copied the first sentence of the Medium article and searched for it. I found a posting on another site “smalldeadanimals.com” where someone claims to be the author of the Medium article and gives more information about how he came up with his ideas.
https://www.smalldeadanimals.com/index.php/2020/04/05/wuhan-flu-21/
“Coronavirus infection has been linked with low red blood cells and hemoglobin in early stages. Later on, COVID-19 can cause widespread inflammation and “cytokine storms” that might injure nerves, increase ferritin, and lower iron [15, 16, 17, 18].
Other markers aside, low iron alone might be worrisome enough.
In one study, low iron increased the risk of dying in hospitalized patients with pneumonia, independent of other risk factors [19].
Low iron levels may also worsen nerve damage. The brain needs iron to function properly. Plus, nerve cells need iron to produce protective myelin sheaths without which they can’t communicate [4, 20, 21, 22].
Thus, it’s possible that coronavirus might lower iron blood levels, increasing the risk of further complications in some patients. That doesn’t mean supplementation is beneficial, though. The role of iron balance in COVID-19 deserves further research [15].“
https://selfhacked.com/blog/iron-ferritin-coronavirus/
From the “paper” : “Anyone can publish on Medium per our Policies, but we don’t fact-check every story”.
I have said, repeatedly, that this hypothesis (it’s not an investigation) COULD be true, presenting it this way doesn’t make it false - but it certainly doesn’t inspire confidence, either.
From the Article:
“I am not a doctor.”
“Anyone can publish on Medium per our Policies, but we don’t fact-check every story.”
Without knowing anything about the author — other than the person is not a doctor — why should we give any credibility to the article? For all we know, the person is an aspiring science fiction writer.
One indicator of a possible, but apparently otherwise “asymptomatic” case of Covid-19 infection would be the SpO2 level <75% with no apparent cause, and if no health history of the individual showed some previously suspected cause. Fever or not, it would signal that something was robbing O2 from the hemoglobin. It would at minimum present a candidate for the Covid-19 test.
One indicator of a possible, but apparently otherwise “asymptomatic” case of Covid-19 infection would be the SpO2 level <90% with no apparent cause, and if no health history of the individual showed some previously suspected cause. Fever or not, it would signal that something was robbing O2 from the hemoglobin. It would at minimum present a candidate for the Covid-19 test.
I’m no doctor either but...if this is true and that is the methodology behind Covid-19’s lethality...wouldn’t that seem to indicate that this virus WAS, in fact, manufactured? It doesn’t seem to be a naturally occurring type of thing.
If the paper was real, and the symptoms were obvious, that would clearly be a way to detect the disease, in some cases.
It would be easier though if we just imagine that everybody gets boils that spell out “Virus”.