But what is the sense in panicking the world over a coronavirus that is 3 times less deadly than the SARS outbreak of 2003 (9.5% vs. 3.4%). And mind you, it has still not been proved that the COVID-19 coronavirus is anything more than a non-symptomatic, non-pathogenic “passenger virus,” being picked up diagnostically but not the primary underlying cause responsible for the Pandemic/Epidemic itself.
In fact, there is direct and indirect evidence that COVID-19 is NOT from a virus at all. The SARS coronavirus, often compared with the new COVID-19 coronavirus, was present only in about half of the SARS cases and antivirals such as ribavirin and oseltamivir (Tamiflu) were not working in SARS culture plates, nor were they very effective in clinics or hospitals either. That passenger viruses do exist has been abundantly documented, as when the HTLV-1 virus (human T-cell leukemia virus Type 1) was mistakenly attributed to being causal for AIDS. And so, the question which never went away looms: are the coronaviruses merely traveler viruses from a yet to be determined primary stealth cause?
Using bacteriocidals instead of antivirals
One recent US news headline said: “Scientists claim antibiotics already on the market could treat coronavirus – despite warnings from CDC and World Health Organization that antibiotics do nothing against viruses and overusing them fuels resistant microbes.
Fact of the matter is that antiviral medicines were not found to provide benefit in either the SARS or MERS strains of coronavirus either, which broke out in 2002 and 2012, respectively. Yet this habit of administering antivirals was stubbornly clung to in the treatment of the 138 Coronavirus-infected patients hospitalized in Wuhan, China described in Wang, et al’s recently published JAMA study.
On the other hand, all of these 138 patients, and most of the 99 patients in Chen et al’s current Lancet study received at least one antibiotic, some of which have significant anti-mycobacterial as well as antibacterial activity. (Mycobacteria are small rod-shaped bacteria, some varieties which have no cell wall and are difficult to distinguish from viruses; mycobacteria cause leprosy and tuberculosis, the latter usually emanating as lower respiratory tract infection that can mimic classic pneumonia, as observed in the SARS and COVID-19 coronavirus cases.)
Antibiotics have no effect against viruses. And although it is claimed that antibiotics are and were simply being used to quell “secondary” bacterial infections in the new pandemic, the fact is that antibiotics have proved universally to be of great help worldwide to the vast majority of novel coronavirus COVID-19 victims, with or without secondary infections.
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it
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