COVID Transmissions for 9-10-2020

Vaccine delivery

Sep 10, 2020

Good morning! It has been 297 days since the first documented human case of COVID-19.

Headlines today; tomorrow I think we will continue the in-depth on vaccine formulation and delivery.

As usual, bolded terms are linked to the running newsletter glossary.

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Now, let’s talk COVID.

More about the AZ vaccine trial

Today the CEO of AstraZeneca provided some more insight on the condition of the patient with a sudden and unexplained illness in the trial. The CEO said that the illness is suspected transverse myelitis, which is an inflammatory condition of both sides of one section of the spine. STAT News has the story: https://www.statnews.com/2020/09/09/astrazeneca-covid19-vaccine-trial-hold-patient-report/

Please note that this is not a confirmed diagnosis, but just the suspected diagnosis. However the CEO did confirm that this patient received the actual vaccine and not a placebo.

This kind of nerve inflammation can happen in any immune-response-inducing treatment, like a vaccine. There are a few questions that will need to be asked about this situation going forward:

How rare is this adverse event? We’ll want to know that it is rare for the trial to continue
How severe is it? Clearly it was quite severe because the patient needed to be hospitalized, but the severity and the rarity both matter—if this happens in many patients but a severe reaction is rare, that will also affect whether the trial will continue
Can it be readily treated? If the condition can be managed and does not cause long-term consequences that will also be important to know

I’m sure we’ll learn more as time goes on.

Turns out ibuprofen doesn’t cause problems in COVID-19

Early on in the pandemic there was a story where WHO appeared to warn against the use of ibuprofen, and potentially other nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) in COVID-19.

At the time, I felt that this statement was based on zero evidence and was totally unjustified.

Thankfully, there is now evidence…that the use of ibuprofen doesn’t impact COVID-19 mortality at all, among other things. A study published in PLoS Medicine looked at the use of ibuprofen in Danish patients with COVID-19: https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.1003308

I’ll quote the study’s conclusions:

Use of NSAIDs was not associated with 30-day mortality, hospitalization, ICU admission, mechanical ventilation, or renal replacement therapy in Danish individuals who tested positive for SARS-CoV-2.

This isn’t a randomized, controlled trial, but I still feel like it puts the question to bed. There was never any reason to believe these drugs would cause problems, and now there’s a study showing that there continues to be no reason to believe that.

What am I doing to cope with the pandemic? This:

Cooking

I’ve been perfecting a beet fritter recipe. It takes shredded beets and shredded sweet potatoes, and this time around I used 2 medium eggs mixed in as well as some chickpea flour as a binder. I then deep fried these as small clumps, for about 2-5 minutes per cake, to get a nice crispy outside and a well-cooked but moist interior.

I served them on a bed of cole slaw. One of the things I love about this is that aside from the sweet potato, everything used here came from our farm share distribution.

Image is of 3 beet fritters sitting on a bed of cole slaw, on a red-rimmed ceramic plate with a beige center.

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