By Staff Writer
Many have called out the statistics, of how Uganda has more Ministers than ICU beds or how we have just one ICU bed per million Ugandans. The main component of the ICU bed is the ventilator and the dialysis. For the case of COVID-19, it’s the ventilator. It would seem like apocalypse if Uganda is hit to the scale of Italy.
Yet, from what we have seen in Italy, ventilators cannot be counted on as the solution. Patients are taking longer on ventilators which makes it impossible to accommodate new patients.
What then is the new breakthrough? Wenzhong Liu in his new research paper seems to present some quantum leap in the handling of COVID-19.
Although COVID-19 has been classified as a respiratory infection, we seem to have skipped out something about the virus. It is the fact that the virus attacks the red blood cells and makes them unable to carry oxygen to one’s tissues/organs and likewise carry carbon dioxide out of these organs. By its nature, the virus is made up of proteins.
These proteins are knocking iron ions out of the heme groups (HBB) that make up the red blood cells. The virus replaces each of these ions with one its proteins. Without the iron ions, it renders the red blood cells unable to carry oxygen and carbondioxide.
As Yishan explains; “The inflammation in the lungs results from the lungs not being able to perform the oxygen/CO2 exchange, and would therefore appear to be a SECONDARY result of the hijacking of the blood. The lungs not working is a result of lack of O2 in blood, not the cause of it.”
Yishan continues that; “The paper models the behavior of chloroquine and faviparavir as well, which appear to bind to the non-structural viral proteins that hijack the heme groups, thus inhibiting them from knocking out the iron and wrecking the O2-carrying ability of the red blood cells. This also explains the observation made by various ER docs (incl this one in New Orleans) that patients tend to have elevated ferritin: ferritin is used to store excess iron. If a lot of iron is knocked out of heme groups and floating around, the body produces more ferritin.”
So what does Yishan make out of Liu’s computer model that could prove useful to Uganda in the coming days;
1. Starting drug treatment while symptoms are mild keeps virus from hijacking too much blood, enabling a still-healthy body to mount an immune response. Explains why early drug treatment (first week of symptoms) is often successful. For Uganda, new cases should be started on treatment as early as possible. “The paper models the behavior of chloroquine and faviparavir as well, which appear to bind to the non-structural viral proteins that hijack the heme groups, thus inhibiting them from knocking out the iron and wrecking the O2-carrying ability of the red blood cells.”
2. Drug treatment and intubation once patient is critical will rarely work because tissues/organs are already damaged, blood can’t carry O2, and the body is too weak to produce new red blood cells able to carry Fe (and thus oxygen/CO2) even if drugs inhibit more hijacking. Uganda’s bet cannot be on ventilators and ICU capacity.
3. Thus: start severe patients on drug treatment upon hospital intake to suppress further hijacking of blood by the virus, then give them a blood transfusion of new red blood cells immediately that are unhijacked. If all this is true, we would see rapid patient improvement.
4. Virus is disrupting the hemoglobin’s oxygen capacity. It is attacking our BLOOD first, not the lungs. It is NOT a respiratory ailment (primarily), lung breakdown symptoms are a consequence of the attack on blood hemoglobins. Hypoxia is happening BEFORE lungs are affected.