Well, here we are at the 6-month point with this Covid 19 scare. Nothing has gripped the American attention this strongly on personal levels since the threat of imminent nuclear destruction in the early 1960s. Possibly the brief hullabaloo over Y2K causing the collapse of technology-based civilization may have grabbed some people’s imagination as strongly as Covid 19. But by and large, this scare seems to have brought the country to its knees. I find myself curious as to why everyone seems to think this virus is so scary. The number of people dying from heart disease and cancer is ten times as high as those dying from Covid 19. Why aren’t we all walking around with heart monitors and getting weekly cancer screenings? Maybe weekly breast and prostate exams are not as appealing as staying at home, eating whatever we want, binging Netflix, and getting paid to stay-cation by the government.
Seriously, why is the fear of this virus so much greater than the much bigger threats we have been ignoring for so many years? Is it because we believe we have the power of the magic distancing rituals and face masks to protect us that gives us the hope we can outsmart this pesky virus? Is it because our health authorities tell us we can halt the spread with ever more intrusive personal inhibitions? The latest call to inhibition is truly hilarious – that sex violates the six-foot rule and we should stick to internet sex. This is relevant to the 20 to 45 age group primarily – the same group that has a death rate of close to zero from Covid 19. Fauci is now calling for goggles and shields in addition to face masks. Next week it will probably be full biohazard suits. All this for a bug that is no more dangerous than the common cold for healthy adults. The question is are you healthy?
But wait you say, what about all the deaths? “It could happen to anyone” is the message we are being given. This is a lie. The people who die from Covid 19 die for other very specific reasons. Covid 19 is a serious threat to those people because they have the co-morbidities that foster a serious reaction to the virus. It is not a random chance who dies, it is for very specific reasons. If you have one of those co-morbidities then you are right to be afraid. If you don’t then you can relax. You are not a target. You will not die. The people who die with this virus already have serious immune system deficiencies and imbalances. The virus is simply the last straw that breaks the system down.
The challenge here is that our health care system does not look at or measure these immune system issues. The tests exist and the experts understand what is going on, but the common everyday doctors in the field do not understand this stuff. They probably learned the theories in school, but there is no practical application of this information in a daily office setting. This is specialist stuff. Immunologists are a rare breed. I have never heard of anyone being referred to one for anything other than the occasional autoimmune disease or blood cancer. They had a few days in the sun when AIDS came out, but not much since then. Most of them live in the world of research.
What is the biggest co-morbidity that triggers death in Covid patients? It is a vitamin D deficiency. Consequently, 92 to 95% of all the deaths occur in people with vitamin D levels below 20 ng/dl. Healthy levels are 70 to 90 ng/dl. Why is this an issue? Vitamin D is the vitamin that balances and controls the immune system. When vitamin D is low the two halves of the immune system get all tangled up and super reactive. Americans tend to have low levels of vitamin D because of a math error made 30 years ago when deciding how much vitamin D is good for us. The mistaken number came out 400 IU when it should have been 4000 IU. Even last week I saw a patient who was told by a nurse that she was taking way too much vitamin D and should limit herself to the 400 IU. Bad information takes forever to extinguish.
Vitamin D is one of the main reasons Covid 19 is hitting minorities/ blacks harder than whites. This has been a problem for hundreds of years. Dark skin needs much more sunlight to form vitamin D than white skin. This was a common problem in the northeast with rickets – the common clinical symptom of vitamin D deficiency. Black children had many times the issue with rickets than white children in the low sunlight belt in the northeast. Black people can need up to ten times as much sun to form vitamin D in their skin. Consequently, black people are much more at risk for low vitamin D levels and therefore at greater risk of death from Covid 19.
The second biggest co-morbidity for Covid 19 is metabolic syndrome/ diabetes / obesity. People don’t understand that metabolic syndrome and its later stage as diabetes is an inflammatory immune system over-reaction. Your immune system is already on overdrive, and the addition of a nasty virus is just one trigger too much for many people. Diabetes is another trigger that increases the impact on ethnic groups like blacks and Mexicans as they tend to have almost twice the incidence of diabetes that white people have. The data is not in yet, but I am willing to bet that Covid 19 will trigger other immune diseases into over expression and possibly cause death. When your immune system is already teetering on the edge, it does not take much to push it over. If however, your immune system is strong and well balanced, then Covid 19 will have either no symptoms or only simple common cold symptoms.
What is the third biggest co-morbidity? Age. Folks over 80 are at a much greater risk. Again this is all about the immune system. By the time you reach the age of 80, your adaptive immune system begins to fail just due to old age. This is exactly what we see in Covid deaths. There is not enough adaptive immune system pumping out virus-specific antibodies to stop the infection so instead the innate immune system over-reacts with a cytokine storm that ends up killing the patient. Even at that, the death rate to date for the over 80 population is around 13% from a Covid 19 infection. That means even if you are old and get Covid, your chance of recovering is 87%. Those are not bad odds. I have a patient in his 80’s in end-stage Alzheimer’s in a home. He has been immobile in a bed for years now and only sleeps all day. He can’t move and doesn’t recognize anyone, yet he got Covid a couple of weeks ago and even he has recovered just fine. This virus just is not the scary critter everyone is making it out to be. The number of deaths is a product of the number of already sick people we have walking around, and the huge number of people that simply exist.
Covid 19 is dangerous to people that have compromised immune systems. It is that simple. Repairing compromised immune systems is a matter of the infamous lifestyle changes. The same suggestions that are given for avoiding heart disease and cancer, are given for improving immune system strength and balance. Eat right, get plenty of sunshine and exercise, lower stress, and foster good relationships. Your immune system is a part of your emotional makeup. The same neurotransmitters that control your emotions also control your immune system. The quickest way to destroy your immune system is chronic stress and fear – exactly what our national response to this virus has created. I will let you make your own conclusions about that.
Any special instructions for building immune system strength to fight this virus with? Obviously checking your vitamin D levels and start getting more vitamin D if needed. When I checked mine at the beginning of this year I was only at 40ng/dl. I have been taking extra vitamin D orally plus using a vitamin D lamp three times a week. When I rechecked my vitamin D level a couple of weeks ago I was up into the ideal range. I also checked my fasting insulin levels and my hemoglobin A1c. My insulin was a 10 and my A1c was 5.3. These are excellent and by my estimates reduce my likelihood of death by Covid by 10,000%. This is quite a bit better than the best estimates of the usefulness of masks reducing infection by 30%.
You do not need to be afraid. Instead, you can take charge of your health and make yourself strong and balanced.
Take care,
David