Chinese New Year and COVID-19

--- My points of view on hot topics regarding COVID-19 Home Recovery

Since China's National Center for Disease Control and Prevention announced the new COVID-19 prevention policy on December 7, 2022, in just 24 days, we have seen off 2022 and welcomed the Spring of 2023 in an unprecedented way of life.

According to the lunar calendar, 2023 is still a special year, with three characteristics: "Year of the Black Rabbit with double spring and Dual-February". There are both positive and negative opinions on this, but we won't discuss them here. On the occasion of the coming of the New Year, I wish my family, friends, classmates and colleagues, no matter what kind of future they face, can maintain a good attitude and healthy body, enjoy life and face challenges together.

In the past 24 days, due to the adjustment of epidemic control policies, a large number of COVID-19 patients have appeared across the country. Some provinces have recorded as many as a million cases in a single day. However, due to the statistical caliber, the official announcement of only a few cases, which has been unable to truthfully reflect the current situation of the national epidemic. Therefore, all kinds of information, true and false, is being widely spread on the Internet. On the one hand, a lot of information is not published at the official level, so the authenticity of these information is difficult to obtain evidence; But on the other hand, due to the rapid development of information technology, the Internet and new media, the spread of a lot of news is surely based on facts to some extent. Of course, the accuracy of this information is open to question. Therefore, we should be analyzed on the basis of understanding, absorption and summary, in order to guide your future life and work. For example, on the news that experts and executives in the pharmaceutical industry have died of COVID-19, the number of top scientific talents in China, such as academicians of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Chinese Academy of Engineering, who have died of COVID-19, and also the news just happened yesterday that Mr. Hong Zhaoguang, a famous Chinese cardiovascular expert and former president of Anzhen Hospital, was hospitalized for emergency treatment due to COVID-19,....... According to my research and judgment, these facts exist, but their accuracy is questionable.

Not many people know that I was involved in pharmaceutical investment and management, but in fact I had been involved in pharmaceutical investment, management, research and development, and production for ten years. In the early 1990s, methorphan was promoted as an upgrade and replacement of codeine in China, and in the late 1990s, Candesartan was amkng the Mandatory Generic Drug Program and I organized the first team to carry out,which got me some understanding and perception of pharmaceutical industry. With the New Year coming, when a large number of patients have begun to recover, a large number of experiences, the experience of the disease and recovery of exchanges have begun to circulate in the society. Many views and propositions not only confused everyone, but also made me think a lot. With my past investment and research experience in clinical drug management, I also began to think and verify. At the same time, I also consulted and exchanged with some famous medical experts, and most of them are my friends. Here are some references, in case you are confused by some so-called scientific experience.

Some of these hot topics may be related to Chinese culture and traditional Chinese medicine. I also share this article with my overseas friends in English. These questions may not be understandable to them, so it is just a pastime, because it is Chinese culture.

The first is about the idea of not taking a shower immediately after the recovery. Not only do most ordinary people insist that they should never bathe and wash their hair immediately after healing, but even my friends around me, many entrepreneurs, experts and leaders, also bring their own personal experience to their own confusion. Even a few unbelievers have challenged to verify this, only to end up with an exacerbation or relapse.

My explanation and proposition is as follows:

First of all, since so many people have confirmed the harm caused by bathing with their own physical examination and experience, there is a reasonable existence, it must be a reason, we should avoid as much as possible.

Secondly, in science and theory, bathing should have no direct relationship with repetition, aggravation and recurrence. For a lot of experience, we need to know two questions: first, whether your bath space is sufficiently constant temperature, and whether your body is stimulated by acute temperature difference during the bath. Second, many people do have the above conditions, also did, but still appear the same problem, so, we are most likely to ignore another problem, do you take a bath for too long, exhausting too much energy? Especially for the long-term maintenance of a good habit of daily bathing and clean people, after a few days, they eager to wash off every bacteria on the body, with their own in the bathroom toss half or an hour or even longer. So I think, as long as you focus on these two things, you should be able to take a shower when you recover.

Second, cross-infection of family members during illness. If the family members are infected sequentially, it's almost impossible for the recoved or recovering ones to be infected from the newly infected members. The reason is very simple, for viral diseases, once the human body produces antibodies, even if the virus is more severe, Immune system of your body is effective for, at least, a few months. As for strains and variants, they do not usually exist in the same family.

Third, this virus is relative harmful comparing to other cold viruses, the harm and invasion of the human body is indeed relatively severe. The immune response process exhausted your ennergy ,even damaged some of the body's function, so after you recovery, you can't carry out high-intensity exercise and physical labor, or even can't spend too long, desk work and mental labor. At present, there are not a few people who relapse and even die due to vigorous physical activity and intensive labor soon after recovery. I hope you can take this as a warning. This is because the virus caused the damage to your body, you need quite a period of time to recover, to adjust your body to a normal state, so during this time, what you should do as much as possible is completely relaxed, sitting, lying down, crawling or leisurely stroll. So how long does this time need? I think if your time permits, you'd better survive this winter.

Fourth, there are questions about the rate of mutation of the strain/variants and the effectiveness of the vaccine. I'm not a scientist to give you a quantitative answer, but I'd rather say that the vaccine's effectiveness, compared to the reinfection caused by the strain change, is clearly unsatisfactory, or poor compared to most other vaccines in use. Of course, we should be clear that drug research is usually a relatively long-term process. I learned from the US FDA and relevant official websites that Paxlovid, Pfizer's COVID-19 effective drug that has been put into use around the world, has not been clinically completed yet, but has only been temporarily put into small batch trial in marketing. Tap here to see the approval file of FDA .

Fifth, the problem of drug use

1. Take medicine or not: It's a matter of individual differences. You have an immune force fighting inside of your body, and you're the commander. Whether you want them to fight and win in fast pace or whether you want them to fight in stages and take a break depends on what you know about your force, what you know about your physical condition and what you know about your immunity and knowledge of the virus as its enemy.

2. What medication to use: When I say medication here, I'm referring to advice during the course of self-meditation at home, so we're usually referring to symptom control medications. For that matter, don't believe the propaganda that exaggerates the specificity of the virus. In order to relieve symptoms, most of the cold medications used to control the symptoms are available, such as fever-reducing medications, cough suppressants, expectorants, antinasal congestion medications, and pain relievers. Ibuprofen is officially recommended because the virus can sometimes cause muscle and joint pain. And ibuprofen falls into the category of non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, of course, it should be  the first choice.

Sixth, the sequelae of the COVID: At present, there are not many detailed studies on the sequelae of the novel coronavirus in the international medical community. However, there are a lot of academic studies on the Post-acute COVID-19 and the studies on the persistence of symptoms of COVID-19. The English name is Post-Acute sequelae of COVID-19 (PASC) or Long COVID-19. My views on the sequelae are as follows:

1. Acute novel coronavirus infection, if recovered within one week to ten days and there is no obvious discomfort and chronic symptoms in the following days, then we can consider that there is no sequelae. At this point, just like with a common viral cold, if the virus is cleared, well, the problem doesn't exist.

2. During the period of acute infection, if complications occur and irreversible damage is caused to organs, such as lung function, the possibility of sequelae is relatively more.

3. In the acute infection period, no matter severe or not severe, no matter hospitalization or mild symptoms at home, there may be a series of persistent symptoms in the prognosis. In this case, we need to pay special attention. This is the focus of international medical research. Why can mild symptoms also lead to a series of persistent problems or sequelae?

There are three reasons for this:

• Residual organ damage. This theory holds that the symptoms of long COVID are due to residual damage to organs caused by the body’s own immune response to SARS-CoV-2 infection.

• Remaining virus. This theory suggests that after the immune system eliminates the virus, some remnants of it survive in one or more organs, and it continues to stimulate an immune response.

• Exaggerated Immune response. According to this theory, in some people, COVID-19 sparks an exaggerated immune response; the immune system then remains in an overexcited state, resulting in various symptoms.

The main symptoms are: fatigue, headache, shortness of breath (shortness of breath), chest pain or discomfort, cough, persistent loss of smell and/or taste, joint pain; Muscle pain/weakness, sore throat, memory loss, brain fog (difficulty concentrating, Confusion or disorientation), dizziness, low degrees, intermittent fever, rapid or irregular heartbeat (palpitations), anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), insomnia, earache, hearing loss and/or tinnitus (ringing in the ears), rash, diarrhea, nausea and/or abdominal pain, reduced appetite, hair loss.

It's worth reminding you that if most of these symptoms occur in the acute phase, don't worry, at least many of them are similar to our cold, not a big deal, including the temporary loss of taste and smell, for the common cold, these symptoms will also occur. Press here to read related essay

The above, is only my personal views, if there is improper，just take as reference. We have noticed that the official name of this epidemic has been officially changed in China. Some people say that it changed the form but not the fact. For me it is necessary at least,it changed not only the name, but also your mind and mentality. Wish friends in the New Year bid farewell to three years of hard work and trouble, welcome a new life.