Health

After eight months of intensive coverage of the covid-19 pandemic, it’s time for Chris to start focusing these twice-weekly videos on other subjects just as important to our future well-being.

But before he does, what have we learned over the course of these coronavirus videos?

Several recent studies show that Vitamin D is a powerful weapon in preventing and treating covid-19. We all should be taking it.

It’s now been clinically proven that people deficient in Vitamin D are statistically more likely to contract the coronavirus if exposed. And similarly, those with greater Vitamin D levels are statistically less likely to get it.

It looks like a major development has just occurred in the fight against covid-19.

A ‘Big Data’ project shoved much of the data collected so far on the coronavirus into one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers. It crunched the numbers for a week and came out with a very significant finding.

It appears that covid-19 causes an overproduction of bradykinin (creating a “Bradykinin Storm”), the compound that dilates blood vessels and makes them permeable. This leads to leaky blood vessels and results in the build-up of blood in the body’s soft tissues.

The data is in, and it doesn’t look good for men who get sick with covid-19. Severe cases appear to do serious damage to the seminiferous tubules of the testes, which produce and regulate testosterone.

We don’t yet know what the effect, lasting or otherwise, this damage may have on fertility.

But this underscores our longstanding advice: you don’t want to get this virus if you can avoid it.

Several quick, cheap tests for covid-19 are rolling out.

Finally, we should be able to do widespread testing that’s not overly invasive, too expensive, or takes forever to get results.

A recent study shows that covid-19 may not be as “novel” a virus (i.e., never encountered before) as previously thought.

And as a result, 20-50% of the population appears to have a degree of “pre-immunity” to the virus.