Dr. @treysolid Since you claim to be the most knowledgable about all of this, true or false?
COVID-19 attacks a blood cell's ability to carry oxygen, similar effect to Carbon Monoxide or Malaria. As such, ventilator can't fix that.
Hydroxychloroquine blocks the virus from being able to disrupt the FE2+ and FE3+ oxygen bonding cycle.
I'll hang up and listen off air.
I presume that what you're referring to is this ChemRxiv paper here:
https://chemrxiv.org/articles/COVID-19_Disease_ORF8_and_Surface_Glycoprotein_Inhibit_Heme_Metabolism_by_Binding_to_Porphyrin/11938173The first thing I noticed about that paper is that the main author is a member of the computer science and engineering department at their school, and indeed, there was no "wet work" done for this paper. Instead, they did a bunch of in silico docking models to see how the viral proteins might bind to porphyrins like heme. So...this all took place in a computer model, NOT in real life.
Second scroll all the way down and look at the version notes:
(my comments in bold)1. Viral protein infects hemoglobin by the immune hemolysis of red blood cells (what this means is that their explanation for how the viral proteins can interact with hemoglobin is that the red blood cell MUST BREAK OPEN FIRST. We know that covid-19 gains entry to cells by binding to the ACE2 receptor, but I couldn't find any evidence that ACE2 is expressed on the surface of RBCs at any significant level, link below to human protein atlas. So I'm gonna go ahead and call bullshit, because if a significant portion of your RBCs are lysing, you've got WAY bigger problems than a viral infection)
2 This article is for academic discussion only, without experimental prove. we hope that qualified laboratories can do experimental verification (There you go, no experimental proof)
3. Since the ability of chloroquine to inhibit structural proteins is not particularly obvious, the therapeutic effect on different people may be different. Due to the side effects and allergic reactions of drugs such as chloroquine, please consult a qualified doctor for treatment details, and do not take the medicine yourself.
https://www.proteinatlas.org/ENSG00000130234-ACE2/bloodThe respiratory distress produced by the coronavirus isn't caused by disruption of hemoglobins ability to carry oxygen, it's caused because of the inflammatory immune response to the tissues affected by the disease (primarily the lungs, when oxygen is loaded into RBCs in the first place) and there might also be some effects due to pathway misregulation around ACE2, which is involved in vasodilation (the ability of blood vessels to dilate and move blood to tissues that need to be oxygenated).
Tl:dr the premise for this paper is mumped
