COVID & Co-Infections (Discussion with Dr. A)

So that's the idea behind the coinfection. Now, with respect to COVID specifically, is it a real problem? This is a question that comes up a lot, and here's the bottom line answer: yes, very much. Hey, it's Dr. A. I want to welcome you to the channel if you haven't been here before. Thank you to all the subscribers and all of you guys sending questions in. They've been really great. Keep that coming. Also, you know, like, share, subscribe, do all of the normal things. And here we go. So today is a question that I got a whole bunch of times that is about the idea of having COVID, but also having other problems. And this one, we want to specify other problems to a subtype. And that happens to be what we call co-infections. The idea of a co-infection is when you have one infection that's bad enough, let's say you have COVID, what if you had Something else or some other things, would that make your experience with COVID worse? Would it potentially make you need more medication, more treatment, uh, maybe worsen your outcomes, et cetera? A common time that this might happen is let's say you have a respiratory infection that's going on, and at the same time, maybe you have a bacteria that's been diagnosed, but you also have a respiratory virus. Now, the 2 together are going to make your experience of the respiratory infection worse than just one of them on their own may. The other thing is that it complicates treatment potentially because you might actually have a treatment aimed at infection number one, that's the one we found, and then you may have other treatments needed for the co-infections. But what happens if we don't know that you have these other infections? So that's The idea behind the co-infection. Now, with respect to COVID specifically, is it a real problem? This is a question that comes up a lot, and here's the bottom line answer: yes, very much. From the early days of the research in the coalition of hospitals in Wuhan, China, that I've written about and talked about having some access to their data, So we could see that really early on when we're talking about other types of treatments. Now, if you look at the research around co-infections, there are so many co-infections identified in people with COVID that it is a huge mass of research data. Now, so it's, it is a problem. Why would this be real bad if you had a bad case of COVID that, say, made you be in the hospital, maybe in the ICU? And that is if the coinfection is not found early enough and your treatment's going in one direction towards the viral infection that you have, but you don't realize you've got a couple of bacterial infections or maybe a fungal infection going on, what can happen is we're treating, treating, treating all of this viral infection problem and the side effects from it and everything else, But then your bacterial or fungal or other infections sort of go by the wayside. Now, this is one theory behind why some of the other treatments that are used alongside the primary COVID treatments might work well. Well, one of the things that they might do actually is they may cover other infections that you have underlying, co-infections that you're not covering with your standard treatment. So it might be that's one of the reasons why they're associated sometimes better outcomes. I've talked to some people, I'm in communication with people with COVID almost daily, and I've talked to some people who've been to the hospital and they're starting to check for certain types of infections that come along with it, but the problem is, let's say we don't do that and we don't know you have this coinfection going on, let's say that coinfection requires an antibiotic or an antifungal drug or an antiviral drug or some other thing, and we're not giving you that, and you've got COVID, and we're fighting, fighting, fighting, well, doesn't it make sense that this untreated problem over here is going to just make you harder to treat all the way along? You could say that for a lot of other comorbidities, co-diseases that go along, but with infections it's especially true, especially if they, you know, live in the lungs or they create inflammation elsewhere in your body, etc. So the idea of a coinfection is real common with people who are used to, maybe you have chronic, some other chronic infectious problem, people with chronic Lyme disease or chronic complex infectious disease syndromes, people with other infections that don't like to go away, they're really used to looking at coinfections and keeping track of them. In the world, in the case of COVID here this last year and a half or so, We, we have a lot of data that there are co-infections, but the learning curve of checking for them in the main is kind of on the upswing. As I said, more recently I'm hearing that hospitals are at least checking for some of the common respiratory infections that go on, but it really, really is a big problem if they're not being treated, and also we don't know they're there. And here's the thing about infections disease. You don't always find them by doing blood tests and testing for them, but if you do find them, you know to treat them. On the reverse side of that coin, if you don't look for them, you don't ever find them. And so if somebody says, well, I don't think that you have co-infections, or I don't think we need to treat co-infections, and that's not based on a bunch of testing to see if they're there, Then that's just a guess. That's all that is. You can't look at somebody and say, "I don't think you have coinfections." Well, you can, but you're just guessing at that point. If you don't test, you can't know and you can't treat. Now, are the tests perfect? Absolutely not. Is it better to try the imperfect tests and make sure there's not a glaring infection somewhere going on rather than not test? Yeah. It's much better to do the testing and take a look. The other thing, as, you know, I'm working with other hospitals, other people treating COVID and all of this business, and then turning around and working with clinicians on how to hone, you know, skills around this, the biggest advice I think that I have is, number one, know that scientifically we have shown over and over there's a lot of co-infections that that go with COVID Number 2, those co-infections tend to be geographic, so if you're in Italy, they might be one group of things. If you're in North America, you know, they may be another group. If you're in China, they may be another group. The bottom line is they are something, because we all have things either that we bring to a disease we didn't know we have, or now that we're run down and we've got COVID and we're inflamed, other infections become opportunistic. Well, I'm Dr. A. I want to answer the question about COVID and co-infections and how important it is to look for them and treat them. Thank you for that question. I would really appreciate if you haven't subscribed, please like, share, subscribe, do the notification bell. We get new videos out every week that go on, and my goal is to answer questions that you guys have very thankfully sent in over time. I have a big stack of them to answer. So this is Dr. A. I'll see you all on the next video. Thank you.