Currently, no clinical trial has approved a treatment. But since the beginning of the epidemic several names of drugs have more or less been mentioned. Among them in the first place, the conflicting hydroxychloroquine. Didier Raoult, the media professor at the Marseille University Hospital Institute for Infectious Diseases (IHU) has been ardently defending this antimalarial since March, causing worldwide media uproar and many twists and turns. The molecule was even tested in numerous clinical trials, including the one launched by France, Discovery. Its effectiveness could not be proven, it was withdrawn from most of the tests including Discovery, as recalled The Parisian. Another treatment that has been under study for a long time was finally abandoned by the Discovery, Solidarity (international) and Recovery (British) clinical trials. It is the combination lopinavir / ritonavir usually used against AIDS but considered ineffective or even dangerous.
There are therefore two treatments with equally unpronounceable names. Dexamethasone first, inexpensive and easily found. She would reduce mortality by a third in the most severely affected patients. WHO called on June 22 to increase its world production. However, it warns about its use in less affected patients or preventively because it could “cause damage”. Finally, the remdesivir which obtained a conditional marketing authorization in the EU on July 3 would have slight efficiency. Its somewhat exorbitant price (390 dollars a bottle) did not prevent the United States from buying 92% of its production. The search for a vaccine, despite colossal sums of money invested in particular by Uncle Sam, is not about to succeed. Progress has been made, but the virus is not yet well enough known.
The most common symptoms are fever, dry cough and fatigue. To this are added less frequently aches, sore throat and head, conjunctivitis, diarrhea, loss (s) of taste and / or smell, rash (discoloration of the fingers and toes). The most serious forms go so far as to cause difficulty in breathing, a feeling of oppression (pain in the chest) and loss of speech or motor skills. A wide variety of symptoms therefore, both pulmonary and neurological; this is what makes this virus special. Other symptoms have been suggested to be linked to the new coronavirus without being officially recognized. Among them, pancreatitis identified by researchers from the Royal University Hospital of Liverpool. More recently, a Covid patient hospitalized in Versailles showed symptoms of priapism : a painful erection of more than four hours.
Covid-19 is, like Ebola or rabies, a zoonosis. In other words, a disease caused by a virus which initially only affects animals, but which has mutated to adapt to humans. Sars-Cov-2, the virus that causes Covid-19 disease, mutates permanently, like all viruses in the world. That is to say, it undergoes modifications which are mostly tiny in its genome, but which can have a direct impact on its properties. On this basis, the hypothesis that the virus circulating today is more contagious or more virulent is entirely conceivable. For a long time, it was considered to be rather stable. But tracking down these genetic variants enabled American researchers to detect the increasing appearance in the environment of an new version of the virus, more contagious. Published in the journal Cell on July 2, their study shows that the Sars-Cov-2 G614 has almost completely supplanted its previous version, the Sars-Cov-2 D614. This new version would have become prevalent around mid-March, that is to say barely a month after its arrival in Europe. This may explain why the epidemic was less significant in China.
This point, perhaps the most sensitive, has given rise to a lot of risky statements, lies, untruths. Again, little certainty and even less consensus. Just this week, Chinese researchers accused Spain to be at the origin of the epidemic because traces of the Sars-Cov-2 were found in the wastewater of Barcelona. Overall, two theses clash: that of a natural origin and that of a human origin. In the case of a human origin, care must be taken to distinguish the hypothesis of a virus artificially created in the laboratory from that, more plausible, of a laboratory selection of a virus which has already mutated. Because, if nothing is to be excluded as long as we have no certainty, the animal origin is almost proven. The question is whether the animal, potentially a bat, transmitted it directly to humans or whether it was handled in the laboratory.
All this is difficult to determine. But ideas like this issued in April by Professor Luc Montagnier, Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2008, according to which the Sars-Cov-2 was made from the AIDS virus are to be excluded. A simple similarity in the genetic codes of two viruses cannot suffice to affirm a correlation between the two. Once the hypothesis of an artificial virus has been ruled out, there remains that of an accident, in the P4 laboratory in Wuhan for example, where the epidemic began. Plausible too, but difficult to verify. The safety measures in these laboratories handling “class 4” microorganisms, that is to say very pathogenic, are deemed to be infallible. Questioned in particular by the United States, that of Wuhan has always defended. Perhaps the most certain is animal origin in the Wuhan wild animal market, which was the very first point raised at the start of the epidemic. Among the multiple arguments supporting this possibility, let us retain that 66% of the first 41 patients hospitalized in Wuhan had been exposed to the market.
The coronavirus is caught if you are close to a sick person: it is transmitted by cough, saliva, hands. This is what is stated on the government website and is officially admitted. So it should be remembered: wearing a mask does not protect us, but others, and today more than ever it is essential to respect barrier gestures. The hypothesis of the seasonality of the epidemic, which was advocated for a long time, can now be ruled out. The spread is not drying up everywhere, so much so that local reconfigurations have been decreed as in Catalonia.
Human-to-human transmission is therefore a certainty, the hypothesis of propagation by air could become one. At the beginning of the week, in the review Clinical Infectious Diseases from Oxford, 200 international researchers have mentioned the “possibility of airborne spread” of Covid-19 and called for the precautionary principle. The following day, Tuesday July 7, WHO recognized by the voice of Benedetta Allegranzi, one of its officials, that “evidence was emerging in this area”. What this means is that the epidemic is not over, and that we must always be extra vigilant.
Via LaDepeche
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