CEOCambodiaNews wrote: ↑Wed Apr 14, 2021 7:52 pm ^^ Inhaled asthma drug shortens Covid recovery and could be ‘significant for world,’ study finds
Hope that GPs will be able to start treating Covid patients at home with cheap and readily available medicine
Samuel Lovett

An inhaled drug commonly used for asthma has been shown to shorten the recovery time of Covid-19 sufferers who do not need hospital treatment – a development that has been described as a “significant milestone” in the fight against coronavirus.

British scientists from Oxford University have found that budesonide, an anti-inflammatory medicine, can help accelerate recovery in the over-50s by an average of three days.

The readily available drug, administered via a cheap inhaler twice a day for up to 14 days, can be prescribed through GPs, raising hope that doctors will be able to start treating Covid-19 patients at home early in their illness.

The NHS has issued new guidance saying the medicine should be considered for patients on a “case-by-case basis”.

Experts have hailed the interim findings from the UK’s Principle trial as a major breakthrough in treating Covid-19 outside of hospital.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/heal ... 30127.html

Background
Multiple early reports of patients admitted to hospital with COVID-19 showed that patients with chronic respiratory disease were significantly under-represented in these cohorts. We hypothesised that the widespread use of inhaled glucocorticoids among these patients was responsible for this finding, and tested if inhaled glucocorticoids would be an effective treatment for early COVID-19.

In conclusion, budesonide, an inhaled glucocorticoid, appears to be an effective treatment for early COVID-19 infection, which could be applicable to global health-care systems. Our findings require urgent validation and dissemination, especially in the setting of a treatment given early that is widely available and relatively safe.
This online publication has been corrected. The corrected version first appeared at the lancet.com on April 14, 2021

CEOCambodiaNews wrote: ↑Fri Apr 16, 2021 1:24 am From the UK:
Rapid Covid testing in England may be scaled back over false positives
Exclusive: leaked emails seen by the Guardian show ‘urgent need for decisions’ on asymptomatic testing
Josh Halliday
Thu 15 Apr 2021 17.48 BST

Senior government officials have raised “urgent” concerns about the mass expansion of rapid coronavirus testing, estimating that as few as 2% to 10% of positive results may be accurate in places with low Covid rates, such as London.

Boris Johnson last week urged everyone in England to take two rapid-turnaround tests a week in the biggest expansion of the multibillion-pound testing programme to date.

However, leaked emails seen by the Guardian show that senior officials are now considering scaling back the widespread testing of people without symptoms, due to a growing number of false positives.

In one email, Ben Dyson, an executive director of strategy at the health department and one of health secretary Matt Hancock’s advisers, stressed the “fairly urgent need for decisions” on “the point at which we stop offering asymptomatic testing”.

On 9 April, the day everyone in England was able to order twice-weekly lateral flow device (LFD) tests, Dyson wrote: “As of today, someone who gets a positive LFD result in (say) London has at best a 25% chance of it being a true positive, but if it is a self-reported test potentially as low as 10% (on an optimistic assumption about specificity) or as low as 2% (on a more pessimistic assumption).”

He added that the department’s executive committee, which includes Hancock and the NHS test and trace chief, Dido Harding, would soon need to decide whether requiring people to self-isolate before a confirmatory PCR test “ceases to be reasonable” in low infection areas where there is a high likelihood of a positive result being wrong.

The accuracy of rapid coronavirus tests and how they should be deployed have been the focus of months of debate in the UK. The proportion of false positives – people incorrectly told they have the virus – increases when the prevalence of the disease falls. This happens because although the number of true positives is falling, the tests produce roughly the same number of false positives – meaning the proportion of incorrect results becomes greater.

It means thousands of people could be wrongly told to self-isolate and miss out on earnings or education due to inaccurate results. The government has advised anyone who tests positive with a rapid test to take a follow-up PCR test and self-isolate until they receive a negative result – but some experts have said this process is too slow and that a second lateral flow test would be as likely to produce the correct result.

Figures produced by government officials estimate that currently only one in 10 positive results are likely to be accurate in London and south-east and south-west England, where there is less Covid-19 in circulation. In England as a whole, they estimate that only 38% of self-reported tests are thought to be accurate, based on the current prevalence of the disease. The Guardian has also learned that Public Health England (PHE) raised concerns about the plan for mass testing, days before it was announced on 5 April.

More: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/ ... -positives

Doc67 wrote: Get people vaccinated, and if they then get Covid-19 and have a week in bed because they feel rough, so what? This is all about not clogging up the health service and people dying in the corridors. If the vaccine can achieve that, the Covid-19 really is just bad flu, and the government shouldn't trouble itself any further.
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jah steu wrote: ↑Fri Apr 16, 2021 2:27 pm But now some countries like Australia are aiming for zero cases and they lockdown entire cities or even States when a single case is discovered. The resulting economic impact is huge.
And along with wanting zero cases, Australia has fumbled its vaccination rollout so badly that they estimate that they won’t have vaccinated the whole population there until the end of 2022! Nearly two years away, and that they won’t open the international borders until then. Unbelievable.


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