Media seems slow – https://www.bbc.com/news/amp/health-54000629?

This was already in NYTimes and we noted on 8/31/20 – https://covid19mathblog.com/2020/08/covid-8-31-20/

Do you want to test for the just the existence – or to test for whether someone is infectious?

“Most people are infectious only for about a week, but could test positive weeks afterwards.

Researchers say this could be leading to an over-estimate of the current scale of the pandemic.

But some experts say it is uncertain how a reliable test can be produced that doesn’t risk missing cases.

Prof Carl Heneghan, one of the study’s authors, said instead of giving a "yes/no" result based on whether any virus is detected, tests should have a cut-off point so that very small amounts of virus do not trigger a positive result.

He believes the detection of traces of old virus could partly explain why the number of cases is rising while hospital admissions remain stable.

The University of Oxford’s Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine reviewed the evidence from 25 studies where virus specimens from positive tests were put in a petri dish to see whether they would grow.

This method of "viral culturing" can indicate whether the positive test has picked up active virus which can reproduce and spread, or just dead virus fragments which won’t grow in the lab, or in a person.”

“A person shedding a large amount of active virus, and a person with leftover fragments from an infection that’s already been cleared, would receive the same – positive – test result.

But Prof Heneghan, the academic who spotted a quirk in how deaths were being recorded, which led Public Health England to reform its system, says evidence suggests coronavirus "infectivity appears to decline after about a week".

He added that while it would not be possible to check every test to see whether there was active virus, the likelihood of false positive results could be reduced if scientists could work out where the cut-off point should be.

This could prevent people being given a positive result based on an old infection.”

“Public Health England agreed viral cultures were a useful way of assessing the results of coronavirus tests and said it had recently undertaken analysis along these lines.

It said it was working with labs to reduce the risk of false positives, including looking at where the "cycle threshold", or cut-off point, should be set.

But it said there were many different test kits in use, with different thresholds and ways of being read, which made providing a range of cut-off points difficult.

But Prof Ben Neuman, at the University of Reading, said culturing virus from a patient sample was "not trivial".

"This review runs the risk of falsely correlating the difficulty of culturing Sars-CoV-2 from a patient sample, with likelihood that it will spread," he said.”

In the blog we talked about science of the PCR test and how it is not just a yes or no lab test.

First clinical trial of Vitamin D for treatment of Covid-19- positive results – https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960076020302764?via%3Dihub#bib0100

“The vitamin D endocrine system may have a variety of actions on cells and tissues involved in COVID-19 progression.

Administration of calcifediol or 25-hydroxyvitamin D to hospitalized COVID-19 patients significantly reduced their need for Intensive Care United admission.

Calcifediol seems to be able to reduce severity of the disease.”

“Our pilot study demonstrated that administration of a high dose of Calcifediol or 25-hydroxyvitamin D, a main metabolite of vitamin D endocrine system, significantly reduced the need for ICU treatment of patients requiring hospitalization due to proven COVID-19. Calcifediol seems to be able to reduce severity of the disease, but larger trials with groups properly matched will be required to show a definitive answer.”

Hmmm want Remedisvir for $3.6K or Calcifedol for under $10 – certainly remedisvir is not 360% better. Let the data point to the answer(s) and that’s what we have done in this blog. Vitamin D has been an early push as noted since early April –
“I have been telling my kids to take D and C as noted in the learnings of 1918 Flu – but here is another confirmation bias report – I also take it ?https://www.irishexaminer.com/breakingnews/ireland/trinity-college-study-says-vitamin-d-could-help-fight-against-covid-19-infections-991944.html “

Far UVC solutions showing up as initially discussed on 8/27 – https://healthelighting.com/blogs/press-releases/the-moments-memory-care-community-is-first-in-minnesota-to-install-state-of-the-art-sanitization-solutions

India leads the way in death again at 1089 – US under 1K

California leads the US in death at 145

Leading county death is LA at 45. Not sure why more discussion on LA deaths not more prominent – perhaps being in TX? They routinely lead the county deaths. CA the state is not always the leader in total deaths but LA seems to lead all counties more often than not.

Here is the big 4 view you can see LA for sure leads in death give early surge and never really coming down since.

Another state view showing much improvement over the beginning surge in the NE

World view countries with 1000+ deaths – unfortunately the list has grown. Interesting to note Spain and Portugal….Portugal has a much lower death per capita than Spain even though more dense in Portugal.