Re:Chloroquine, past and present
by roenxi on Friday March 20, 2020 @11:08PM
(#22644038)
I'm reminded of the old armour-where-the-bullets-aren't story [0]. The most important things to watch out for are places where symptoms don't show up at all.
One interesting challenge that the people doing studies must be facing is that by the time symptoms get bad the virus is probably to some degree irrelevant. If someone's lungs have given out then whether or not there are virus particles in their body probably doesn't matter so much; the damage is done. Raw viral load isn't putting people in hospital as much as that important parts of their body have been dissolved.
For a drug to be effective against the virus maybe it needs to be cheap & administered very early before symptoms become too obvious. That'd be hard to study.
One interesting challenge that the people doing studies must be facing is that by the time symptoms get bad the virus is probably to some degree irrelevant. If someone's lungs have given out then whether or not there are virus particles in their body probably doesn't matter so much; the damage is done. Raw viral load isn't putting people in hospital as much as that important parts of their body have been dissolved.
For a drug to be effective against the virus maybe it needs to be cheap & administered very early before symptoms become too obvious. That'd be hard to study.
[0] https://medium.com/@penguinpress/an-excerpt-from-how-not-to-...