(Updated) (Living Post): COVID-19 Treatments & Tests Box Score
Antibody Tests/Plasma Donors: UCSF and San Francisco General Hospital are "looking for adults who have recovered from known or suspected COVID-19 infection and who are willing to be plasma donors in the San Francisco Bay area. You will be asked to answer questions about your health history. Then you will be asked to come in to ZSFG for tests to confirm that you are recovered from COVID-19 and that your blood contains antibodies against the virus" before donating plasma. hividgm.ucsf.com
Thursday April 23, 2020
Treatments: Today's paper listed two drug treatments now in clinical trials for treating people infected with COVID-19, "colchicine" and "leronlimab".
Diagnostic Tests: Governor Newsom set a goal for the state to administer 60,000 - 80,000 diagnostic tests per day up from 16,000 tests per day the state is currently administering. The goal must be reached in order to "reopen the state" the article said. The state is already behind the week's milestone goal of 25,000 tests per day, with only 16,000 tests being administered per day this week. Shockingly, lack of swabs and vials is one reason the state is behind on this testing goal. The state is also short on chemical reagents which are used to process the COVID-19 tests.
Antibody Tests:
Strains Sequenced (new): An article in today's paper identified two major strains of COVID-19: a Wuhan, China strain and a strain whose mutations match those from Washington state. The Washington strain also originated in China, but the virus, which mutates about three times per month, gains a strain fingerprint based on those mutations. As such, genetic sequencing can identify whether the strain arrived directly from China. The Washington strain was identified in all the passengers of the Grand Princess cruise chip that docked in California in March. The Washington strain has been identified in 14 U.S. states and "accounts for a quarter of all known cases" in this country. The Washington COVID-19 strain has also been identified in Australia, Mexico, Iceland, Canada the UK, and Uruguay.
Thursday, April 16, 2020
A myriad of reports on the myriad variety of diagnostic tests in a myriad of locales has been reported by a myriad of news outlets. Many tests are not FDA-approved. We cannot test everyone. Even if we were a functioning country, testing everyone all the time would be excessive.
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"We just don't know" ... weeks into shelter-in-place, we know a lot more about testing for and treating COVID-19 than we knew in March. If only we could gather what we know all into one place.
Diagnostic tests:
How many different kinds of diagnostic tests are there? A thermometer read is a base test. Where can we get tested? How much do they cost?
Antibody tests:
Quantity, reliability descriptions needed here.
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Treatments:
Ventilator or no-ventilator? C-pap machines are a gentler treatment than ventilators. Oxygen tanks enable at-home treatment. Some people treat themselves by resting at home, exercising their lungs and "proning".
This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
