Stuff I might do if I had covid

[-]NormanPerlmutter3y30

Could you provide more details on getting Paxlovid? My understanding was that it was only authorized for people with certain health conditions.

[-]MondSemmel3y50

IIRC according to Zvi the health conditions are broad enough to encompass a significant chunk of the population, and the medication is currently way under-prescribed because people are not aware that they're eligible for it.

EDIT: If I understand that website correctly (which I may very well not), being "at increased risk of severe illness" includes old age, pregnancy, or having medical conditions including common stuff like diabetes, being overweight, having a mental health condition, "physical inactivity" (?!), smoking or having a substance abuse disorder, etc.

[-]NormanPerlmutter3y10

Thanks.

[-]RHollerith3y30

Dr Russell Jaffee, who runs a company that formulates and sells nutritional supplements, says oral quercetin is not absorbed into the bloodstream well enough to have any effect. Fortunately quercetin dihydride is widely available (at least in the US) and is absorbed much better.

I tried quercetin (to prevent "mast-cell degranulation", nothing to do with covid) 3 or 4 times over the years and never noticed any effect. Then I tried quercetin dihydride and noticed the desired effect.

[-]RHollerith3y20

I mean quercetin dihydrate. (I current cannot edit my contributions to LW because software is complicated.)

[-]delton1373y10

Peperine (black pepper extract) can help make quercetin more bioavailable. They are co-administered in many studies on the neuroprotective effects of quercetin: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0,22&q=piperine+quercetin

[-]Lukas Finnveden3y*20

FWIW, friend-of-a-friend who had covid took 100mg of fluvoxamine together with melatonin and a range of cold & flu medication, and got something that was probably serotonin syndrome. Also strong drowsiness (slept for 10h) which is normally anti-correlated with serotonin syndrome, but which was plausibly caused by the melatonin+fluvoxamine interaction.

Serotonin syndrome is pretty bad. It's unclear what caused it in this case. (It's normally super rare if the only seratonin-boosting thing you're taking is a single SSRI.) But we know that fluvoxamine+melatonin interacts to increase melatonin levels a ton. And I think melatonin-levels have non-0 interaction with serotonin-levels. So personally, I would not simultaneously take melatonin and fluvoxamine as a response to covid.