Coronavirus Pandemic (COVID-19) (SARS-CoV-2) [2020]

Best visualization so far, IMO:

https://aatishb.com/covidtrends/

Cheers

 

Let me quote from the NIH "Fact Sheet for Health Professionals" on Vitamin D:

A substance where the toxicity starts at 10000IU = 250µg/d? Sounds pretty toxic to me. But hey, what do I know. Maybe you are the kind of person that eats arsenic for breakfast.

 

Per day, over prolonged periods of overdose. 'Pretty toxic' will poison you. 'Very toxic' will poison you quickly. 'Mildly toxic' will poison you slowly. 'Non-toxic' will still kill you in overdose. On a scale of toxic substances at the levels people sensibly ingest, Vitamin D will barely register.

It's fine to warn people of overdose, but it's misleading to call it toxic, espescially associating it with rat poison as if it was something an Agatha Christie villain would slip into a drink. "Three Vitamin D tablets blended into the smoothie is all it'll take to kill my husband, and then his fortune will be mine!"

 

Heck, even oxygen is "toxic". Should we stop breathing?

 

You missed couple 0's there, he said taking 1 000 000 IU daily could lead to poisoning in weeks. 1 000 000 IU of Vitamin D is 25 000 µg or 25mg

 

I think you and some other folks here have no clue what toxic means in a medical sense, so let me quote the definition from MedicineNet:

Toxicity is usually measured in mg/kg and since we can't determine lethal dosis by experimentation on humans (too few volunteers), animal testing is used (usually rats, mice, rodents and other animals we know behave similar to humans for certain classes of substances). The reference value used in Toxicology is the LD50, the dose at which 50% of the test population die and 50% survive. For rats the LD50 of water is about 90.000mg/kg, the LD50 of arsenic is 50mg/kg, the LD50 of vitamin D3 is 10mg/kg (all orally taken), values taken from here. Water is one of the least toxic substances we know, while arsenic and vitamin D3 are among the most toxic. Sorry, I did not come up with the definition.
For humans vitamin D3 is probably not as toxic as it is for rats, but probably still in the ballpark of arsenic. So yes, you probably could poison someone with a single acute dose of vitamin D3, Agatha Christie style, and you wouldn't even need a spoonful. (Putting it in a drink is probably not a good idea though, since it is insoluble in water.) They would not die on the spot, but a couple days later unless treated in a hospital (the dying later part is exactly why it is used as rat poison).
But the important thing is that there is a wide range between totally safe and lethal where a substance can still be toxic = harmful. And with vitamin D3 toxic starts well within the range of what some people take.
There are enough people who think more is better, because it's "a vitamin". Let me quote from this New York Post article, which brings us back to the corona virus:

No, I did not. You just did not read my post. I was citing the value from the NIH "Fact Sheet for Health Professionals" on Vitamin D:

 

Is Vitamin D available pure? If not, if people aren't administering pure Vit D to themselves, then we're talking about over-the-counter pills here for those thinking Vit D supplements can help with Covid19. 1000 IUs of Vit D, a supplement pill, is 25 micrograms. 10 mg per kg would be 500 milligrams for a 50 kilo person. At 25 micrograms per pill, that's 20,000 pills you'd need to eat. That's 20,000 Vitamin D pills blended into the smoothie to kill the husband.

That's where WhiningKhan's comparison with water comes in. You'd need to consume thousands of times the RDA to poison yourself with Vitamin D supplements, whereas only 5x (his numbers) the RDA of water to poison yourself with water.

And yes, 150,000 IUs of any supplement is stupid and to be warned against, but that's overdosing quantities rather than natural toxicity - you can overdose on anything. If people want to take supplements to top up low level's of Vit D because of a lack of sunshine, a pill a day isn't going to do them any harm. 1000 IUs a day isn't toxic.

 

Botulinum toxin would like to have a word when it comes to most toxic. Roughly 100ng is enough when injected, which doesn’t stop a load of vain people to do it in the hopes of becoming less wrinkly.

N00bs main point is a good one though. Just because something is good for us in a small dosis, doesn’t mean that ten times the amount is ten times as good. Or even good at all. Credit where credit is due, Paracelsus stated that the dose makes the poison almost 500 years ago. Some ideas take a while to penetrate the collective human psyche.

 

True. My mother has been taking vitamin D3 Gummies for at least 10 years now. Her dosage is 2 gummies daily (each 2000 UI, or 50 mcg) which corresponds to the serving size. The bottle has no warnings on dosage but notice some online with 5000 ui pills.

It seems there is increased demand as I did have problems getting the last D3 order online with many retailers indicating out-of-stock.

 

You can buy capsules containing 40000 IU online in the UK:
SunVit-D3 40,000 IU (1000µg) – 10 capsules
With just one capsule, you can consume an amount that can pretty safely be considered toxic.

That's why I have written that daily dose should not exceed 4000 IU and that's why the toxicity threshold is believed to be in the range of 10000 to 40000 IU as I have quoted previously (even though adverse effects have been associated at serum levels that can be achieved with daily doses below that).
I mean an adult 80kg human can eat 25 µg arsenic day in, day out with (probably) no side effects. Does that mean arsenic isn't toxic?
All I have been saying is that people should not exceed maximum daily dose of 4000 UI and should not think that more is better! It's healthier to go outside than to take vitamin D supplements!

Yes, Botulinum toxin is right at the top. Probably the most toxic substance known to man with an LD50 of 0.00001 mg/kg (LD50 in rats). It's off the charts.

 

Bookmark this. When the doubling time of deaths* gets above 3 days, we will have begun to get past the runaway period of the pandemic.

Note the current doubling times for China (35 days) & South Korea (12 days).

*not cases, which can be underdiagnosed

Here's why you should track deaths per day. Death by coronavirus is unmistakable, & occurs by sudden respiratory distress. Easily identified.

Cases are distorted because testing is still coming online. Increasing caseloads can demonstrate spread - or effective medical response.

Median time from infection to symptoms is 5 days. When death occurs, it does so 14 days after first symptom, on average. 5+14=19 days.

So we might *start* to see a slowdown 3 weeks after shelter-in-place directives go into effect.​

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1241464189912317960.html

 

Though it's labelled directions are "one per week". And it's very much outside the norm of supplements. And it's not available either; click the drop-down "see more" under dosage...

New regulations mean that SunVit-D3 40,000IU supplements can no longer be sold directly to the public online as this strength exceeds recommended weekly supplementation regimens and there is the potential for people to confuse this strength with a daily supplement.​

No-one's disagreeing there, except many of us are locked in our houses and can't go outside. It's just the way you worded your caution seemed alarmist; it's the presentation, not the message, that is disagreed with. More realistically, if Vitamin D is beneficial to fighting off/preventing Covid19, and people can't laze in the sun, taking a Vitamin D pill a day should help without risks, no? People who are stupid and take a massive overdose in the hopes it'll be more effective are setting themselves up for a Darwin award. There's nothing particular about Vitamin D they need to worry about, and the focus should be on educating them not to over-consume anything.

 

Confirmed cases at 14% increase, hospitalized at 23% increase, deaths at 41% increase. So still pretty much in the thick of it.

Ohio's numbers today, confirmed: 2199 (up from 1933), Hospitalized: 585 (up from 475), and 55 Deaths (up from 39).
Confirmed Cuyahoga County: 527 (Up from 493).

 

COVID-19 in Canada
March 31, 2020, 11 am EDT

Number of people tested
236,851

Confirmed cases
7,695

Probable cases
13

Deaths
89

 

2019 Novel Coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19) for Dallas County Texas
https://www.dallascounty.org/departments/dchhs/2019-novel-coronavirus.php

March 31, 2020 - 631 confirmed cases - 13 deaths

631 confirmed cases up 82 over yesterday and two new deaths
Those 82 cases represent a 14.9% increase over the last day

Increases (by percent) over the last 5 days - 21%, 19.6%, 11.1%, 12.5% and now 14.9%

 

I am not aware of any known cases where single mega-dose of D3 proved fatal or even caused serious harm. Humans just don't work that way. Of course if you practically choke someone with the stuff, there will be acute effects, but there is no need for anyone to be scared when using typical pharmacological products.

Here's a representative case report:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4185191/

 

Are there any sites that report the numbers tested? I'm really interested in the percentage of negative tests. That information seems really hard to come by (or at least it's not consolidated anywhere)

 

Can "Recovered" individuals catch covid-19 again? Or are they excluded from the general population susceptible to catching it?

 

There were few tests that showed them getting infected again some time ago, but there were doubts if the tests were done and read right or not. Never heard from it again and current assumption, to my understanding anyway, is that you do develop some antibodies against it, but no-one knows how long they last or how effective they really are

 

Two early to tell, but here was article about it and similar coronaviruses:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/25/health/coronavirus-immunity-antibodies.html

I think even if we don't have a lifetime vaccine against this thing or immunity is not long lasting, eventually we will get to the point that at any given point in time enough people will have immunity so it doesn't spread fast and our treatments will be much better.