new deadly human-to-human-transmissible coronavirus emerges out of China
POSTED BY: 1KIKI
UPDATED: Tuesday, May 5, 2026 22:21
VIEWED: 203741
PAGE 134 of 283
I've been reading about this - how atypical COVID-19 pneumonia is.
A little background: except with certain very particular diseases, like advanced chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, people get a sense of needing to breathe MORE!!! NOW!!! (suffocation) not because they're running low on blood oxygen, but because the carbon dioxide they'd normally exhale is building up in their blood. And pneumonia interferes with gas exchange in the lungs, because the tiny delicate sacs called alveoli where gases are normally exchanged between air and blood are instead filled with pus or fluid. Oxygen needs to go into the blood, and carbon dioxide needs to go out.
Normal blood oxygen is 94-99(100)% of all the oxygen the blood can hold. In COVID-19 pneumonia, people can have a little as 50% the normal blood oxygen without feeling distress. (BTW, in my hospital work, there were plenty of people dying at 70-80% blood oxygen during a code, and if it was lower than 65% we assumed it was an accidental draw from a vein instead of an artery. So when this doctor writes about how shockingly low their blood oxygen levels were, I can understand a bit of how he feels).
Somehow, oxygen isn't getting in due to pneumonia, but carbon dioxide is getting out.
How is this disconnect happening?
Quote:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/20/opinion/coronavirus-testing-pneumon
ia.html
We are only just beginning to understand why this is so. The coronavirus attacks lung cells that make surfactant. This substance helps keep the air sacs in the lungs stay open between breaths and is critical to normal lung function. As the inflammation from Covid pneumonia starts, it causes the air sacs to collapse, and oxygen levels fall. Yet the lungs initially remain “compliant,” not yet stiff or heavy with fluid. This means patients can still expel carbon dioxide — and without a buildup of carbon dioxide, patients do not feel short of breath.
Patients compensate for the low oxygen in their blood by breathing faster and deeper — and this happens without their realizing it. This silent hypoxia, and the patient’s physiological response to it, causes even more inflammation and more air sacs to collapse, and the pneumonia worsens until their oxygen levels plummet. In effect, the patient is injuring their own lungs by breathing harder and harder. Twenty percent of Covid pneumonia patients then go on to a second and deadlier phase of lung injury. Fluid builds up and the lungs become stiff, carbon dioxide rises, and patients develop acute respiratory failure.
By the time patients have noticeable trouble breathing and present to the hospital with dangerously low oxygen levels, many will ultimately require a ventilator.
Silent hypoxia progressing rapidly to respiratory failure explains cases of Covid-19 patients dying suddenly after not feeling short of breath. (It appears that most Covid-19 patients experience relatively mild symptoms and get over the illness in a week or two without treatment.)
A major reason this pandemic is straining our health system is the alarming severity of lung injury patients have when they arrive in emergency rooms. Covid-19 overwhelmingly kills through the lungs. And because so many patients are not going to the hospital until their pneumonia is already well advanced, many wind up on ventilators, causing shortages of the machines. And once on ventilators, many die.
This explains to me the many people who were improving, in the hospital or at home, who then suddenly died. And it explains the many patients who die at home because they weren't ever doing too badly.
I think there should be a protocol for EMS that requires hospital transport for evaluation when a person's oxygen saturation is below 90% (optimal) or 87% (practical). Because by then, the person has serious pneumonia.
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I have read in various places - but can't recall where at the moment- that if you treat with oxygen very early in the disease you will reduce mortality by quite a bit... 50% or more. That may be one of the reasons why fatalities seem to escalate beyond the number of infections when the crisis becomes acute. Because as medical systems are overcome, they resort to keeping people at home with no treatment, and that more people then progress to severe/fatal illness when they might have recovered with less radical treatment earlier.
As the weeks go on doctors are learning more and more how to treat covid-19.
The one thing I'm very resistant to is that Fauci, Bill Gates et al seem to be bent on keeping everyone hostage, prolonging the crisis until we get a vaccine ... THEIR vaccine... by which they will make a lot of money
That's one of the reasons why I don't understand what people like SIX have against mask-wearing, even mandatory mask-wearing. It's the one preventative action that everyone can take that isn't going to get any corporation or bank rich, and doesn't cede a whole lot of control to the government.
You'd have to be a bonehead not to get that point.
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Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake
#WEARAMASK
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Interesting. Don't spend a lot of time on that, but if you could find it I'd be interested.
I read something related. It was that common practice was to automatically intubate patients with low oxygen saturations (O-sats), but that intubation might be causing its own set of pathologies. So it recommended pronation, O2 by nasal cannula, and CPAP or BIPAP first, in that order.
Maybe there should be special treatment hospitals/ wings/ floors for people with COVID-19 whose only symptom is low O-sats (and fever plus other non-life-threatening symptoms). You do want to continuously monitor them in case they progress to ARDS, and in a place where they could be quickly transported to an intensive-care setting, so you'd want them to be in a hospital. But it seems you could avoid a lot of mortality with early at home screening, and widespread, low-invasive, O2 treatment and monitoring.
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As for masks - no kidding.
Just fyi - as you know, I've been harping about testing for quite a while (and after all this time, in the 'greatest' country on the planet, we still don't have enough). But I've also been recommending masks and hand sanitizers since page 1 of this thread.
So Signy and I have been posting the same things for a long time.
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99% or more don't need hand sanitizers or masks.
They need one of two things... preferably both.
1. Don't be old.
2. If you can't help that... healthy eating habits, vitamins, regular exercise and just a general healthy lifestyle will do.
But, I mean, it's too late if you're already old and you treated your body like shit your entire life. Then you better wear a mask and wash your hands like you've got the world's worst case of OCD.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Yanno, if only 1% are going to die of COVID-19 in this country, that's 3.5M deaths.
You either need to check your math or you need to check your brain, because something isn't right with your post.
I apologize to everyone for starting a thread to keep up with facts about SARS-COV-2, and driving JACK over the edge with too much reality.
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Quote:
Originally posted by 1KIKI:
Yanno, if only 1% are going to die of COVID-19 in this country, that's 3.5M deaths.
You either need to check your math or you need to check your brain, because something isn't right with your post.
I apologize to everyone for starting a thread to keep up with facts about SARS-COV-2, and driving JACK over the edge with too much reality.
Hence the "or more"... very likely or more.
I'm perfectly alright with 3.5 million deaths, but there won't be that many.
NYC is near 100% infection rate.
I'm a patient man. I've been waiting years to rub Trump's upcoming win in Ted and Second's face.
Going to be fun rubbing this one in yours too. Maybe even more because you've dethroned Wishy as king bitch of the RWED, Karen.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Well, WISHY was willing to flush all but 100 in support of her agenda, and you're willing to flush 3.5M+ in support of yours. I think that puts you number 2 on the Hitler scale.
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But I have a question for you. Is your goal environmental, to, yanno, reduce the number of people on the planet?
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Apaprently there are a number of serological tests being run by various research institutions to look at the infection rate of SARS Cov-2.
One, in Santa Clara, purported to show that the infection rate was 50-80X higher than previously confirmed. However, I heard some interesting criticisms of that test that I wouldn't have known about if I had taken the results at face value.
The first is that the sample population was NOT random. The authors recruited people on FB by offering a Covid-19 test, so the sample could have been enriched by people who felt that they had had symptoms and/or were exposed and were looking to get tested by the only means available to them. And, since they were recruiting on FB, I'll bet you dollars to donuts some people on FB recruited their equally worried FB friends. Statistically, only 50 people in 3,300 with specific concerns would have been enough to kink the study results.
The second comment is that the (Chinese) particular test kit that they used had real-world issues with false positives.
The third criticism is that one of the lead authors has a financial interest in the test kit so there's a built-in conflict of interest.
https://www.politico.com/states/california/story/2020/04/20/california
-antibody-studies-suggest-higher-infection-rates-but-experts-warn-data-could-be-flawed-1278211
But other studies are in the works ... the latest from USC which shows that approximately 4% of the LA population had Covid-19 at one point. Unlike the Stanford study, the population was really random. But they used the same point-of-care test kits as the first study, which are plagued by high false positives.
https://news.yahoo.com/early-study-points-far-more-072149550.html
In any case, I think it's safe to assume that California is in the realm of about 1-6% infected, depending on where you are, which puts us in the very early stages of the pandemic. That means that there are potentially ~15 - 80X more deaths still waiting in the wings.
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Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake
#WEARAMASK
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