HACKER Q&A
📣 imjoseph

What can we do as a community to help India fight Covid 19?


I see people desperately searching YouTube for oxygen concentrator designs, there is very little legitimate resource available out there and hard to find. starting this thread here to collate any known resources for tech that help fight the COVID crisis in developing countries - oxygen concentrator, respirator, pulse oximeter - designs, supplier list etc..


  👤 taxicabjesus Accepted Answer ✓
Oxygen concentrators without the antidote for oxygen toxicity [0][1] won't help very much.

All the repurposed drugs that are useful have anti-inflammatory properties. @farid__jalali, an MD on twitter, is trying to get a study for the anti-serotonin drug Cyproheptadine going. He's observed several patients get pulled out of death spirals I guess. He's written a paper with some colleagues explaining the role of serotonin in severe COVID-19, and is trying to get this published.

Dr. Jalali has run into medicine's "gatekeepers". I suspect his actual problem is that repurposed generic drugs that saves lives leave money on the table, and undermines the Emergency Use Authorizations [EUA] the vaccines are sold under.

Cinaserin is another anti-serotonin drug that'd probably also be useful for treating the serotonin storm [2] associated with severe COVID-19: https://twitter.com/TaxiCabJesus/status/1385260243492380680

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22993262

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25883728

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serotonin_syndrome