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anon_mlxxvlbug9dpa
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Sheeeeee-it. At least 10 lbs heavier than I should be. I keep getting random injuries.
I just received the results from my Covid-19 antibodies test
- Thread starter DrHoops
- Start date
Antibody testing requires blood. Swab only works for an active infection.
I am Chinese after all. We aren't known for our knee sized willies! If I was, I would be in the movies.
Yes. The point of care test kits only requires a few drops. Swabbing is for extracting flakes of the virus. Both are vulnerable to human errors.
Swabbing or the PCR tests can be tested on patients like a day or two after the potential exposure. Antibodies tests only tell you if you are infected or have recovered with the presence of the antibodies and so in Covid's case, seven days after signs or symptoms or exposure.
I was wondering if it wasn't a point of care testkit and actually a tube of blood drawn out.
I borrowed that joke from the former color commentator for the Chicago Blackhawks, Dale Tallon. So funny:
I love listening to them trying to hold it together.
I love listening to them trying to hold it together.
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That was funny.
There's another famous off the cuff cricket commentary: “The bowler's holding the batsman’s willey.” during a match between West Indies v England.
(Michael Holding was the WI bowler.
Peter Willey was England's batsman.)
They took a pretty big vial from me. I was kinda surprised at how much they got in 30 seconds.
I've tried to understand cricket. It makes my brain hurt, so I turn on baseball. That's more my speed.
They made me do a drive in swab test. Once they knew I didn't have it we set up a blood test for the antibodies.
Interesting approach. They swabbed you and then how long did you wait for the results? If they have enough PCR extractors it should be a two-hour wait.
There has been a lot of criticism of the antibodies tests, the PCR tests being the gold standard. It's interesting that they swabbed/PCR tests and it came back negative and then did an antibodies test on you and you were positive. It means that you were sick quite some time before you were tested.
You should be immune for now. Your antibodies naturally will start to reduce in numbers after a while but your T-cell's primary role is to store the memories of these antibodies and will get the body to reproduce more relevant antibodies if you are faced with the COVID virus again, barring no mutations -- which will not be surprising since seasonal flu mutate regularly.
Anyway, the relevance is that I am trying to figure out why the spread amongst the migrant workers here in Singapore doesn't seem to abate. Numbers today generally reflect actions done or implemented a fortnight prior. They have been in lockdown far earlier than the general population.
I have been told that they have tested 60% of them in the dorms already which is why the confirmed cases are still so high. (And they almost exclusively use the PCR tests here -- they don't trust the antibodies testing kits.)
I wonder if the exclusive usage of the PCR tests, which are prone to human error anyway are the cause and the flaw in their approach -- and their inability to manage the spread within the migrant workers in their dorms.
Well, one thing is I live alone in a high rise apartment. I would imagine the migrant workers have fairly crowded quarters. Or at least are closer than I was to anyone. There were times where I didn't leave my apartment for 5 days.
I still don't like going out much now. Everyone has a look of fear on their faces. Its a downer.
I still don't like going out much now. Everyone has a look of fear on their faces. Its a downer.
The emerging long-term complications of Covid-19, explained
“It is a true roller coaster of symptoms and severities, with each new day offering many unknowns.”
At first, Lauren Nichols tried to explain away her symptoms. In early March, the healthy 32-year-old felt an intense burning sensation, like acid reflux, when she breathed. Embarrassed, she didn’t initially seek medical care. When her shortness of breath kept getting worse, her doctor tested her for Covid-19.
Her results came back positive. But for Nichols, that was just the beginning. Over the next eight weeks, she developed wide and varied symptoms, including extreme and chronic fatigue, diarrhea, nausea, tremors, headaches, difficulty concentrating, and short-term memory loss.
“The guidelines that were provided by the CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] were not appropriately capturing the symptoms that I was experiencing, which in turn meant that the medical community was unable to ‘validate’ my symptoms,” she says. “This became a vicious cycle of doubt, confusion, and loneliness.”
Somewhere between 5 and 80 percent of people who test positive for Covid-19 may be asymptomatic, or only develop symptoms days or even weeks after their test, and many of these people will have a mild form of the illness with no lasting symptoms. But Nichols is one of many Covid-19 patients who are finding their recovery takes far longer than the two weeks the World Health Organization says people with mild cases can expect. (The WHO says those with severe or critical cases can expect three to six weeks of recovery.)
Because Covid-19 is a new disease, there are no studies about its long-term trajectory for those with more severe symptoms; even the earliest patients to recover in China were only infected a few months ago. But doctors say the novel coronavirus can attach to human cells in many parts of the body and penetrate many major organs, including the heart, kidneys, brain, and even blood vessels.
“The difficulty is sorting out long-term consequences,” says Joseph Brennan, a cardiologist at the Yale School of Medicine. While some patients may fully recover, he and other experts worry others will suffer long-term damage, including lung scarring, heart damage, and neurological and mental health effects.
The UK National Health Service assumes that of Covid-19 patients who have required hospitalization, 45 percent will need ongoing medical care, 4 percent will require inpatient rehabilitation, and 1 percent will permanently require acute care. Other preliminary evidence, as well as historical research on other coronaviruses like severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), suggests that for some people, a full recovery might still be years off. For others, there may be no returning to normal.
There’s a lot we still don’t know, but here are a few of the most notable potential long-term impacts that are already showing up in some Covid-19 patients.
Lung scarring
Melanie Montano, 32, who tested positive for Covid-19 in March, says that more than seven weeks after she first got sick, she still experiences symptoms on and off, including burning in her lungs and a dry cough.
Brennan says symptoms like that occur because “this virus creates an incredibly aggressive immune response, so spaces [in the lungs] are filled with debris and pus, making your lungs less pliable.”
On CT scans, while normal lungs appear black, Covid-19 patients’ lungs frequently have lighter gray patches, called “ground-glass opacities” — which may not heal.
One study from China found that this ground-glass appearance showed up in scans of 77 percent of Covid-19 patients. In another study out of China, published in Radiology, 66 of 70 hospitalized patients had some amount of lung damage in CT scans, and more than half had the kind of lesions that are likely to develop into scars. (A third study from China suggests this is not just for critically ill patients; its authors found that of 58 asymptomatic patients, 95 percent also had evidence of these ground-glass opacities in their lungs. More than a quarter of these individuals went on to develop symptoms within a few days.)
“These kinds of tissue changes can cause permanent damage,” says Ali Gholamrezanezhad, a radiologist at the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California.
Although it’s still too early to know if patients with ongoing lung symptoms like Montano will have permanent lung damage, doctors can learn more about what to expect from looking back to people who have recovered from SARS and MERS, other coronaviruses that resulted in similar lung tissue changes.
One small longitudinal study published in Nature followed 71 SARS patients from 2003 until 2018 and found that more than a third had residual scarring, which can mean reduced lung capacity. MERS is a little harder to extrapolate from, since fewer than 2,500 people were infected, and somewhere between 30 and 40 percent died. But one study found that about a third of 36 MERS survivors also had long-term lung damage.
Gholamrezanezhad has recently done a literature review of SARS and MERS and says that for this subset of people, “The pulmonary function never comes back; their ability to do normal activities never goes back to baseline.”
Additionally, Covid-19 scarring rates may end up being higher than SARS and MERS patients because those illnesses often attacked only one lung. But Covid-19 appears to often affect both lungs, which Gholamrezanezhad says escalates the risks of lung scarring.
He has already seen residual scarring in Covid-19 patients and is now designing a study to identify what factors might make some people at higher risk of permanent damage. He suspects having any type of underlying lung disease, like asthma, or other health conditions, like hypertension, might increase the risk of having longer-term lung issues. Additionally, “the older you are, probably the higher your chance of scarring,” he says.
For people with this kind of lung scarring, normal activities may become more challenging. “Routine things, like running up a flight of stairs, would leave these individuals gasping for air,” Brennan says.
Stroke, embolisms, and blood clotting
Many patients hospitalized for Covid-19 are experiencing unexpectedly high rates of blood clots, likely due to inflammatory responses to the infection. These can cause lung blockages, strokes, heart attacks, and other complications with serious, lasting effects.
Blood clots that form in or reach the brain can cause a stroke. Although strokes are more typically seen in older people, strokes are now being reported even in young Covid-19 patients. In Wuhan, China, about 5 percent of hospitalized Covid-19 patients had strokes, and a similar pattern was reported with SARS.
In younger people who have strokes, mortality rates are relatively low compared to those who are older, and many people recover. But studies show only between 42 and 53 percent are able to return to work.
Blood clots can also cut off circulation to part of the lungs, a condition known as a pulmonary embolism, which can be deadly. In France, two studies suggest that between 23 and 30 percent of people with severe Covid-19 are also having pulmonary embolisms.
One analysis found that after a pulmonary embolism, “symptoms and functional limitations are frequently reported by survivors.” These include fatigue, heart palpitations, shortness of breath, marked limitation of physical activity, and inability to do physical activity without discomfort.
Jogging is terrible on joints. Don't ever jog: run. I loaned a book out to my daughter so I don't have it here now to reference, but I believe it's called "run until you're 100." A leading running coach teaches proper stride and technique. He's adamant against jogging.
When my sons were playing sports I took them to speed & strength training facility near us. The first thing they did was to break the heel-toe running style most casual runners use. The trainer told them (and me) that your calves are your shock absorbers and every stride should land on the balls of your feet. He said if you want to know the proper form for running or jogging take your shoes off and run on the sidewalk, your heels won't hit the concrete for very many strides. I used to get shin splints, after changing my form I've not had any in years.
My body isn't built for jogging anyway. I am ex rugby player. More build for pounding but unfortunately got taken down by stupid massage move by someone literally half my weight!
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anon_mlxxvlbug9dpa
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I had major knee issues until I realized I was just doing it incorrectly. Now that I do it correctly I don’t have em anymore. Good shoes, the right stride, and staying off of concrete are gonna let me run for a long time.
Do you take turmeric? It's a natural anti-inflammatory that a former college football player turned orthopedic surgeon recommended to me . . . and it's gotten me back to running a bit on the trails while I'm hiking in the woods.
That said, I don't have any swelling any more . . . that was taken care of with the 2nd surgery on my left knee. You might have something structural - torn cartilage, for example.
In any case, turmeric seems to be one of those ubiquitous supplements these days . . . and it seems to work pretty well.
Here's some information, courtesy of WebMD: https://www.webmd.com/vitamins/ai/ingredientmono-662/turmeric
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It's funny. A friend of mine was telling me the same thing a few days ago. But it sounded like wd40 or windex ... Does everything!!
I have been taking glucosamine for years. It basically keeps it from blowing up as quickly.
I will order turmeric in my next order from iherb.
Thanks!
Be sure to get some with at least 5% pepper extract (bioperine), to enhance absorption. Here's my preferred brand:
https://www.dontwasteyourmoney.com/products/nutricost-turmeric-curcumin-curcuminoids-bioperine/
BTW, I can't take glucosamine because it consists in large part of ground up crustacean shells, and they tear up my stomach for some reason. No such issue with turmeric.
BTW2, if you haven't had your knee checked for structural damage, you might want to. A torn knee cartilage can occur over time as we age, and the torn pieces can cause tissues to tear, which results in swelling. If you have that and don't get it fixed it'll just get worse.
Read the list of uses in the WebMD link . . . it's pretty much a WD40/Swiss Army Knife for the human body.
I wish Trump figured out a way to spray WD40 right in to my joints.
I had an MRI done.
Just hoping I won't snap it one day as it degenerates. Jumping off 3ft high ledges worries me nowadays!
Why don't you write him a letter and ask him? He knows these science stuff very well. Has a knack for it apparently from his uncle.
I would be cautious about injecting bleach though. But UV lamp idea maybe plausible if done through the right orifice. Shine a light as they say.
Has anyone seen Melania lately?
That has got to be a relief, on a personal basis, to have the antibodies of the virus. Hopefully, the test will be made available to all of us soon, and those who test positive for the antibody can get a move on with their life.
The problem still lies with the asymptos.
Why would anyone bother to test themselves is they aren't showing any signs or symptoms? This is like 40-60% of the cases.
Monthly mandatory testing is the only solution. Then isolate the positive cases. But you need to combine PCR/RNA and antibodies testing together.
I used to play tons of indoor soccer. seven nights a week back in the days when the turf was glorified carpeting. i'd get shin splints to the point of tears. shin splints are the worst!
Indoor is a soccer is a killer. Basically like pinball machine. Non stop.
the other thing we'd get were "stone bruises." that's where the ball of your heel would hurt like a mfer.
There is no give in the old school carpet that sits on top of concrete. It's not like the 5G pitches that kids get to play on.
I used to play in the business/company leagues here. Played on some scary pitches with divots that could break ankles. Some muddy ones where the ball would literally come to a stand still during the rains.
It was fun. That's how I got to know the country. Playing in various stadiums and pitches around the place. Some of those guys were rapid. Small but fast. Hip check them and they would fly! Best way to stop those pesky June bugs.
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