Update on preventive throat disinfection / antisepsis to counter COVID-19

Additional infor­ma­tion has come to our atten­tion with regard to our ini­tial pro­pos­al for pre­ven­tive throat disinfection/antisepsis to counter COVID-19.

Five days after we called for clin­i­cal stud­ies to be con­duct­ed to test our pro­pos­al in our “Additional thoughts”¹, researchers from the University of Kentucky have post­ed a tri­al employ­ing one of the sub­stances we had men­tioned as effec­tive against coro­n­avirus­es to the clinicaltrials.gov web­site.²

Specifically:

“In this study, front line health­care work­ers will be asked to com­plete a pre-par­tic­i­pa­tion sur­vey and screened for COVID pos­i­tiv­i­ty. They will then be giv­en pre­made PVP-I gar­gles and nasal sprays, as well as a cal­en­dar card to mark com­pli­ance. PVP-I nasal spray and gar­gle (10% dilut­ed 1:30) will be used pri­or to the start of a shift, dur­ing “lunch break”, and at the end of shift. First, the nasal spray will be sprayed in the nose (2 sprays each naris). For ade­quate cov­er­age, the par­tic­i­pant should be able to taste the iodine or see it in the back of the throat. This should be left in place for 30 sec­onds. Then, the par­tic­i­pant will gar­gle the solu­tion for 30 sec­onds and not have any­thing to eat or drink by mouth for 30 min­utes. Treatment will con­tin­ue for 3 weeks, or until the health­care work­er presents with COVID symp­toms. Participants will then be test­ed for COVID pos­i­tiv­i­ty and asked to fill out a sec­ond ques­tion­naire assess­ing study tolerability.”

The tri­al has report­ed­ly start­ed one day lat­er, and is expect­ed to be com­plet­ed by May 2021. The tri­al design appears to dis­re­gard, unfor­tu­nate­ly, the time of day we have pos­tu­lat­ed – in accor­dance with a pri­or arti­cle by US pul­mo­nolo­gist Bruce L. Davidson MD³ -, as being like­ly the most impor­tant one for pneu­mo­nia pre­ven­tion, name­ly before going to sleep.⁴

In addi­tion, study results were pub­lished yes­ter­day with regard to effi­ca­cy of the same sub­stance against COVID-19 in vit­ro.⁵

Title: “In Vitro Efficacy of Povidone-Iodine Nasal And Oral Antiseptic Preparations Against Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome-Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2)“

Results: “All con­cen­tra­tions of nasal anti­sep­tics and oral rinse anti­sep­tics eval­u­at­ed com­plete­ly inac­ti­vat­ed the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Conclusions: Nasal and oral PVP-I anti­sep­tic solu­tions are effec­tive at inac­ti­vat­ing the SARS-CoV-2 virus at a vari­ety of con­cen­tra­tions after 60s expo­sure times.“

This, too, appears to indi­cate that a wider inter­est in the idea we have put for­ward on March 16 has recent­ly begun to emerge.

1. https://loico.com/additional-thoughts-regarding-benefit-throat-disinfection-covid-19-like-epidemics/[↩]
2. https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04364802[↩]
3. https://edition.cnn.com/2020/03/12/opinions/coronavirus-vulnerability-while-sleeping-bruce-davidson/index.html[↩]
4. https://loico.com/the-logic-of-surviving-the-coronavirus-pandemic/[↩]
5. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.25.20110239v1[↩]