Stuff I might do if I had covid

post by KatjaGrace · 2022-05-11T00:00:20.312Z · LW · GW · 9 comments

Contents

9 comments

In case anyone wants a rough and likely inaccurate guide to what I might do if I had covid to mitigate it, I looked into this a bit recently and wrote notes. It’s probably better than if one’s plan was to do less than a few hours of research, but is likely flawed all over the place and wasn’t written with public sharing in mind, and um, isn’t medical advice:

Here’s a Google doc version, where any comments you leave might be seen by the next person looking (and you might see comments added by others).

Here’s a much longer doc with the reasoning, citations and more comments.

(I continue to guess that long covid is worth avoiding.)

9 comments

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comment by NormanPerlmutter · 2022-05-11T05:44:00.621Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Could you provide more details on getting Paxlovid? My understanding was that it was only authorized for people with certain health conditions.

Replies from: MondSemmel
↑ comment by MondSemmel · 2022-05-11T08:17:13.734Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

IIRC according to Zvi the health conditions are broad enough to encompass a significant chunk of the population, and the medication is currently way under-prescribed because people are not aware that they're eligible for it.

EDIT: If I understand that website correctly (which I may very well not), being "at increased risk of severe illness" includes old age, pregnancy, or having medical conditions including common stuff like diabetes, being overweight, having a mental health condition, "physical inactivity" (?!), smoking or having a substance abuse disorder, etc.

Replies from: NormanPerlmutter
↑ comment by NormanPerlmutter · 2022-05-13T06:31:18.861Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Thanks.

comment by RHollerith (rhollerith_dot_com) · 2022-05-11T01:04:47.424Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Dr Russell Jaffee, who runs a company that formulates and sells nutritional supplements, says oral quercetin is not absorbed into the bloodstream well enough to have any effect. Fortunately quercetin dihydride is widely available (at least in the US) and is absorbed much better.

I tried quercetin (to prevent "mast-cell degranulation", nothing to do with covid) 3 or 4 times over the years and never noticed any effect. Then I tried quercetin dihydride and noticed the desired effect.

Replies from: rhollerith_dot_com, delton137
↑ comment by RHollerith (rhollerith_dot_com) · 2022-05-11T01:09:03.925Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I mean quercetin dihydrate. (I current cannot edit my contributions to LW because software is complicated.)

↑ comment by delton137 · 2022-07-17T14:33:45.432Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Peperine (black pepper extract) can help make quercetin more bioavailable. They are co-administered in many studies on the neuroprotective effects of quercetin: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0,22&q=piperine+quercetin

comment by Lukas Finnveden (Lanrian) · 2022-05-15T18:57:12.186Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

FWIW, friend-of-a-friend who had covid took 100mg of fluvoxamine together with melatonin and a range of cold & flu medication, and got something that was probably serotonin syndrome. Also strong drowsiness (slept for 10h) which is normally anti-correlated with serotonin syndrome, but which was plausibly caused by the melatonin+fluvoxamine interaction.

Serotonin syndrome is pretty bad. It's unclear what caused it in this case. (It's normally super rare if the only seratonin-boosting thing you're taking is a single SSRI.) But we know that fluvoxamine+melatonin interacts to increase melatonin levels a ton. And I think melatonin-levels have non-0 interaction with serotonin-levels. So personally, I would not simultaneously take melatonin and fluvoxamine as a response to covid.

comment by Rafael Harth (sil-ver) · 2022-05-11T19:06:38.047Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Is plushcare a thing for people in Europe? Can't find an answer via googling.