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Corona virus, like any other RNA virus such as flu, HIV, Ebola, SARS, still is an RNA virus, which travels like a virus, communicates like a virus, and acts like a virus, so it must be treated like a virus. Nevertheless, the Corona virus is new, and there is a reason and rationale for it being a new and novel. It is new for its novelty, otherwise Corona virus has been there for decades, and its fundamental feature of a virus for a few billion years.
Viruses are placed at the very beginning of life, and thus have seen all other organisms moving through their creation and evolution over this very long period of time. Humans as a specie are by the way the latest amongst the evolved animal species just about 2 million years ago.
Evolution of an organism occurs with time and rate of mutation in its genome. Corona virus for being in existence for 3 billion years, and a mutation rate of one million times higher compared to human existence for 2 million years, has over 26 trillion times evolutionary advantage to exploit human body.
The implication of this analysis is multi-fold. First and the foremost is the medical care of those affected by the infection by Corona. While much of the specific characteristics of Corona is not yet known, it is assumed to be highly infectious presumably due to its high rate of proliferation, producing a huge number of virions for further infections. Many countries like China, South Korea have capped the virus infection within four months period. However, the fear, nay panic, continues, primarily because there is no vaccine, no clinically proven drug as per USFDA approved guidelines, lack of rapid detection system to confirm the cases, and a highly contagious nature of the virus.
Even if the 4 month long cases are extrapolated to the whole year, and assume the outcome from precautions similar to China, Japan, South Korea, etc., it would appear the cases may not be more than a few millions. It is of course possible that the total lock down observed in China or prompt testing and quarantine implemented in South Korea does not happen in other countries, but there is good possibility of repurposing drugs used for SARS, MERS, Flu, HIV for COVID-19, mitigating medical care burden in the healthcare system.
Looking for a comparison, CDC estimates that so far this season there have been at least 38 million flu illnesses, 390,000 hospitalizations and 23,000 deaths from flu (https://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/index.htm), despite vaccine and modern medicine being available, albeit only partially effective. But that is the case for most serious viral diseases.
In fact, there are success stories from India, France, and China for the use of anti-Ebola drug Remdesivir, anti-HIV drugs Lopinavir and Ritonavir, in combination with chloroquine to treat COVID-19 patients successfully. Thus, these treatments will/should at least be available either on an emergency basis, or with fast track clinical trial.
While clinical data is important and needs to be properly developed, it is a bit too puritan to assume that when people are confined to their houses, schools and colleges have been closed, US government is considering giving the reins of the government to the military, we are bickering about placebo controlled clinical trial of a drug or a group of drugs which have been approved against viruses and parasites, with acceptable safety records! We are in extra-ordinary times requiring extra-ordinary measures by even mediocre minds.
The second implication is that of the healthcare. Given the fact that the viruses are ancient in nature, keeping the basic nature of their structure (encapsulated virions) and mechanism of action, it is possible to (1) consider generalized approach of countermeasures, such as chemical inhibitors of viral enzymes, or blocking their entry and translocation with amino compounds, such as chloroquine, (2) develop vaccines to neutralize them, and (3) take measures to enhance the innate immunity to fend them off.
While the first approach of drug development takes time, unless repurposing works, and vaccine development is also a time taking process even for its partial success against viruses. The third point of innate immunity is a feature of most organisms, albeit with variations from humans, and is a part of the Darwinian human evolution. Over a period of time the natural human ingenuity has utilized natural resources of diet and herbs to enhance their innate immunity. The innate is what keeps us alive from the very beginning, and many of the dietary herbs in fact synergize the adaptive immunity of vaccines and antibodies as well.
But again, we have heard from the medical professionals that there is in fact no evidence that these herbs and diets work against Corona virus. Actually, that is the truth, but given the virus is so novel, and these herbal products so common and inexpensive that there is hardly a pharma company which will conduct a clinical trial for the lack of financial reward.
Expecting placebo controlled clinical trial for synthetic drugs certainly makes sense, given safety and efficacy concerns of these untested molecules. However, demanding same clinical trial of natural herbs being used in diets for millennia to address there is no evidence is egregious.
At the risk of being factitious, it would be equivalent to stating that there is in fact no evidence in 99.99% cases that our fathers are in fact our fathers, as no one ever bothered to prove that using paternity test!! There are some obvious things in life.
It would be prudent to combine the approaches of holistic healthcare and modern medicine, as is practiced in India and China, and with isolating the population to prevent infections, we should ride over this potential calamity relatively safely!
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Professor Bal Ram Singh is the director of Botulinum Research Center of Dsartmouth, the Institute of Advanced Sciences, and President of Prime Bio, Inc., a biotech company.
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