31 December

A shift in how they treat acute Covid is a shift we're seeing in other parts of medicine too. Rather than just trying to attack and remove the infecting pathogen, which is diabolically hard once it's inside you, to instead tweak your own body's response to infection, to better allow your immune system to fight the pathogen. Inflammation is the major response to infection, it's your immune system going into overdrive to try to kill the pathogen. But it also can get in the way, causing swelling and fluid build-up etc. The scary cytokine storms that killed early Covid patients were their own immune systems going into overdrive, flooding their bodies with inflammation products. Lungs are usually black in a chest X-ray, look at this seriously sick Covid patient's x-ray, the lungs are white. That white is the inflammation products from the immune system, trying to kill Covid. People literally choked to death on those products. Now some physicians instead target the inflammation itself, the immune response, modulating it so that the immune system is free to then attack the virus. Most people who get Covid receive no treatment for it. I think that's a mistake, yes they'll usually survive the acute illness and feel better. But the virus will often remain in them, causing sometimes very serious ongoing chronic issues for their health, maybe not until years later. Many drugs used in this approach are over-the-counter cheap drugs, re-purposed. The antivirals like Paxlovid that get a lot of press are often not much use by comparison. Gotta get that viral load down as soon as possible, to stop the virus setting up shop.