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March 13, 2020 - The Dan Bongino Show
41:28
Coronavirus Facts vs. Fiction Interview with Dr. Centeno (Ep 1203)
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Get ready to hear the truth about America on a show that's not immune to the facts with your host, Dan Bongino.
Thanks for tuning in to another installment of our interview series here on The Dan Bongino Show.
This is an interview you're not going to want to miss.
I record these intros after the interview to tell you what's in them.
We interviewed Dr. Chris Centeno from Regenexx about an article he wrote that went viral after we talked about it on our show about fact versus fiction regarding the coronavirus case.
Ladies and gentlemen, it's a can't-miss interview.
Everything from how contagious it is, to how you can get it, to how you can't, we cover.
It is an all-encompassing interview to dispel some of the myths you've heard about this.
Let's get right to it.
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All right, ladies and gentlemen, without further ado, Dr. Chris Centeno from Regenexx on the Wuhan virus outbreak.
It's a real honor to have on a doctor, Chris Centeno.
A little background, I read Dr. Centeno's article on Regenexx.com or Paula did refer to me, read it on the air, got unbelievable feedback.
People love the article.
And now Dr. Centeno was kind enough to give us this time and come on and do an extended show on the coronavirus.
Doctor, thank you so much for your time.
It's an honor to have you here.
Yeah, thanks, Dan, for having me on and happy to answer any questions you have.
Well, we got a lot of them based on the audience feedback, and that may be understatement of the millennium here.
So you wrote this article at Regenexx.
You actually wrote a few, one about the coronavirus, why you weren't worried per se, given your experience in medicine.
The next one was debunking some myths.
I'm going to cover a lot of that today, some facts versus fiction, because your article really put my wife at ease.
I don't think anybody's questioning if it's serious.
Obviously, being a medical professional, the question is not—and tell me if I'm wrong—the question is not, is it serious?
The answer is, of course it is.
The question is, how serious?
Everything's on the margin, correct?
That's how we view this in medicine.
You're 100% right.
I mean, it's a very serious thing.
We have to take it very seriously.
Having said that, You know, listen, I was getting bombarded by questions from my patients, from family, and so I decided to really dig into this to see how serious it was so I could answer those questions.
And you're right, it's serious.
We should take it seriously.
But the media is sort of blowing it up, and there's no reason to cause an abject panic, which is really kind of what's happening.
Now Doctor, in your medical experience, probably having treated patients as long as I've been alive for this, I want to age you or age me at a young age, what's the difference in severity, I get this question all the time and obviously I don't have the expertise to answer it, between this and influenza or variants of influenza like H1N1, and I think the gist of the question I'm getting from my audience is, If H1N1 was deadly too, which it was, it was a severe problem, but it, you know, again, it was dealt with in a manageable way.
Why the dramatic response to this?
And by dramatic, I mean, you know, this massive sell-off in the stock market, like it's the end of times.
What's the difference in severity between this seasonal flu and, say, H1N1?
Yeah, there are a couple of differences, but listen, the big answer and the easy answer to that is at the end of the day, when it comes to the old elderly, so people who are, let's say, 75 to 85, H1N1 or the standard influenza virus or pandemic causes a lot of damage.
The mortality rates in that age group can be very high.
So if you look at the mortality rate for this, the coronavirus, what is it?
And that's the billion or the trillion dollar question right now.
So if you look at what that is, outside of Wuhan, China, it was 0.4% was the fatality rate.
If you look at the new German data that actually just came out today, it was 0.2%.
If you look at the cruise ship data, it was 1%.
So you're starting to see some clusters there around 1% or less.
And if you look at the flu, what's the mortality rate of the flu in the elderly, which is what this seems to affect more than anything, it can be, again, quite high, about half a percent to one percent.
But this is a different animal.
This is something that can affect younger people and they can require hospitalization and require ventilators, which is why what we're seeing in Italy has kind of gotten out of hand.
We're talking to Dr. Chris Centeno from Regenexx, who wrote a fantastic article I will link to, ladies and gentlemen, in the show notes today.
Two of them, actually.
Please read them.
They're worth your time.
It's really facts and fiction, which is what we need right now.
You know, that's important, Doc.
You brought something up about the Diamond Princess, and it's in one of your articles at Regenexx, again, which we'll post for our audience in the show notes at bungino.com for you to read.
You write that the Diamond Princess creates kind of an interesting case study.
Closed environment, you know who's on the ship and who's not, obviously.
And you talk about that in one of your articles, how that study leads you to believe that some of the mortality rates and the death rates, excuse me, being reported are maybe exaggerated.
Can you just explain what you meant by that with regards to that specific cruise?
Yeah, so the Diamond Princess cruise starts in Wuhan, China.
It starts in the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak, and it goes around, does its thing for a month, and then it docks in Japan.
So we know that there were at least one, if not more, infected people on that cruise, because a week before it docked, finally, there was a guy that got off in Hong Kong, and he tested positive about six days later for the coronavirus.
So we have 4,000 people in a closed environment with a shared air handling system, with shared spaces.
If you've ever been on a cruise, you can't get away from it.
You've got stairways with handles, you've got elevators, you've got common areas where everyone eats or circulates through different areas where people eat.
And so that gave us this really interesting environment to look at, albeit in a slightly older population, because cruisers tend to be about 10 years older on average than the U.S.
population, but it gave us an environment to look at how bad this thing was.
That's brilliant.
I read that portion of the story, and again, nobody on this call, this interview, or on this show, I'm sure, is taking this thing any less seriously than it needs to be.
It's very serious, but that put me at ease.
Because like everyone else, I have kids, I have a wife, I love it, a family I love, and I was concerned.
But your point in that, and it's in the article again we'll post, folks, is that in this controlled environment, if this was A contagion like we'd never seen before with an R0, an infection rate off the charts, then more people on that ship, and please correct me if I'm wrong, you're the expert, should have gotten sick.
Not saying a lot of people did, it's infectious, no doubt about highly infectious.
But again, we're talking about not if it's serious or not, how serious.
Am I right there that if it's as dramatic as everybody was making it out to be, more people should have come down ill?
Yeah, they tested everyone.
Unlike everything we're seeing in the media right now, they tested everyone on that ship and everyone who got exposed.
And 17% of the people on that ship ended up contracting this after a month.
So as you might imagine, if you look at even the flu pandemics, normally if you test everyone in the population in an area that's affected, it's 20-40% of the population that will test positive for the flu.
Obviously some people shrug it off, no big deal.
Some people get a bit sick and a few people get really sick.
So that was the first thing that set my mind a little bit at ease with this whole thing, was that 17% number.
17% number, not 50%, not 80% after a month, but 17% in a pressure cooker of a flu spread
machine called a cruise ship.
I mean, kind of asking a question.
I mean, everyone knows he has to.
But I think, again, hearing it from you, medical professional, put some folks at ease here is one of the issues that this is a novel virus.
There's no natural collective kind of societal immunity to this.
I mean, obviously, although the flu virus mutates and there are, you know, I don't know, thousands of rhinoviruses, hundreds is I'm not sure.
Therefore, you can get a cold repeatedly.
There's very little natural collective immunity to this coronaviruses.
Is that correct?
Yeah, that's correct.
So one of the reasons why, if you take the 1918 pandemic, which everyone is pointing to now, that was really bad, the Spanish flu.
In 1918, the older people had some collective immunity to that.
So it really affected younger people.
This is sort of the opposite.
Younger people are doing really well and the old elderly 75 to 85 year old age range are faring very poorly.
So that's really, it's the opposite of what we normally see because it's a novel virus.
Now one of the things I'm reading that May explain that phenomenon.
I'll ask you the disparity in outcomes and severity of the illness between older and younger folks.
And again, please correct me if I'm wrong, is that older folks may be having a more Active immune response, which is causing their lungs to get inflamed and fill up with fluid, leading to more cases of pneumonia.
Whereas younger, maybe kids, teenagers, 20 and 30 year olds who maybe live in a kind of dirtier environment, running around all day, taking the train, you know, kids putting dirt in their mouth or whatever.
Their immune systems have learned to kind of handle this thing without overreacting.
Is there any medical validity to that?
Yeah, older people have immune systems in that age range that start to fail and go south.
And so they tend to sort of overreact to things like this and not be able to resolve inflammation as quickly as younger people can.
So you're right.
That's one of the things that's at play here in the, again, not, you know, elderly is sort of considered from retirement age on, but we're really talking about the old elderly.
For instance, the mean age of deaths in Italy right now, based on what the health minister said three days, is 81.4 years.
Now you gotta imagine, to get a mean of 81.4, you can't have all that many young people on that data set.
It's just not possible.
Yeah.
Yeah, matter of fact, one of the people I spoke to on the bureaucratic political side, but nonetheless, who'd been in consultation with medical professionals and said that the cases in South Korea and Italy, where they have relatively advanced medical systems of people under 30 dying from this, Exclusively from this are almost non-existent.
It's typically from some other issue.
I'd like to get you from your article again, we're talking to Dr. Chris Centeno from Regenexx.
I'll have his articles posted at the website.
I strongly encourage you to read them to again, put your mind at ease.
Serious problem, folks.
How serious is the question?
You debunk a lot of myths here.
Another one you address.
You say coronavirus survives much longer on surfaces than the flu virus, or this is one of the myths you should say, I should say, which is up to nine days on plastic.
How serious of a problem is this?
If someone, I mean, I guess real world examples matter, if someone is to say sneeze near a handrail, is this a viable virus nine days later or is this some media hysteria not commensurate with reality?
Yeah, that one got started by the Washington Post.
So the Washington Post quoted an article, and I actually pulled the article.
Now that article was a review of a bunch of other articles, so I pulled all the articles that that article was based on.
And if you really read those articles, what you see is that it really says that other coronaviruses, not this one, survive for about two to three days on plastic.
That's the longest that they survive for.
They survive much less on other surfaces.
Now, just today, an online pre-publication service put something out there that says just that.
They tested this virus and it lasted two or three days on plastic, which is the longest surface.
Everything else was less.
So again, not nine days, it was two to three days, but you could kind of misconstrue one of the papers if you didn't really read them all to say that it's still alive at nine days, but the bottom line is it's 10,000 times less after nine days.
So again, that was an exaggeration.
Right.
This is important.
I mean, this stuff you're putting out there right now is priceless because honestly, doc, you're, this is your job.
You're a medical professional, but we, you know, there's soccer moms and working moms and working dads out there.
They don't have the time or candidly, a lot of us, the expertise to read through the jargon and a lot of these medical journals, and it's super helpful to have someone like yourself write pieces like this to finally start to put people at ease.
A couple more of the myths you address in here.
One, uh, Coronavirus is aerosolized, which we know, and some people say, well, the flu is not.
Hence, the spread of this disease can be much more dangerous than the flu.
That is, in fact, a myth.
The flu is aerosolized as well, correct?
That's the primary way the flu spreads, so there's no difference there.
That's just pure hype.
I'm glad we got that out there again, folks, because this is, again, a lot of media-driven hype to, I think, frighten people, sometimes unnecessarily.
Another one of the myths you address, before I get to some of the audience questions we have here, you say there's a myth out there the coronavirus will ramp up in the U.S.
over the next few months and by summer we will become China.
Massive pandemic here.
A country on lockdown with millions of cases and our health system will crash.
I get that question a lot.
How likely is it, given exponential proliferation of this in some other countries, that we could be like China?
And keeping in mind now, we're obviously seeing a lot of social distancing measures.
Events are being canceled.
New York and L.A.
just put out an edict saying no gatherings of more than 50 people in L.A.
No gatherings over at all, I believe, in New York.
They're canceling Broadway shows.
So now that we've taken these measures, will we become Wuhan, China, or is this just potential hysteria here?
Yeah, again, I think we've got to look at this.
So we are at the tail end of the prime viral respiratory spread.
So what I mean by that is, if you look at the last 36 years of CDC data, and you look at where the peak was, which month for the flu, It starts in December, then it goes about the same in January, it peaks in February, a little bit in March, and then by April and May, in the last 36 years, we've never had a peak.
So, we're on the end of that.
So, if you will, it's a tragedy what's happening in Italy right now.
Having said that, the U.S.
got in at the right time, if you will, because we're moving towards those months where it gets harder for viruses to spread.
Why?
This is aerosolized, and when the temperatures go up, viruses don't survive very long in water droplets.
So that's why you don't see summer flu peaks, because the temperatures are too warm.
And that's the same thing with this virus.
So just to be clear, when the humidity in the air, is that of something to do?
Is that what you're suggesting?
The humidity in the air?
It makes it a very difficult replication environment for this virus when someone, say, sneezes?
Or is it the heat or the humidity?
Is that what it is about the summer environment?
You know, it's primarily the heat.
So as an example, in that one study on plastic, when they turned up the heat, guess what?
The virus died.
So if you think about going outside and touching a handrail, by May those handrails are going to be 120 degrees in the sun.
At 120 degrees, these viruses are dead in minutes.
Interesting.
So that's one of the reasons why you see differences in these things that have a hard time spreading in the summer.
So the answer to your question, ultimately, do I think we're going to crash?
Listen, we have to prepare.
We've got to get ventilators ready because there's going to be people that need them.
We've got to have our ICUs ready.
We've got to have testing dialed in.
We've got to be able to cordon off those people who really need to be cordoned off.
Having said that, The U.S.
is really in it a pretty good time, unlike Italy and China.
So not to sound in any way macabre, Doc, but if we were to have unfortunately encountered this earlier, say in November, going into the winter, we could be in a far different situation, no?
We could be, yeah, because that would be prime respiratory virus, flu season spread.
I mean, you know, that's prime time of what allows these things to spread.
The colder weather allows these things to survive longer.
One of the things I read about that also in the cold weather, adding to what you just said, the environmental conditions being a little more apropos for replication in the colder months, is that in the colder months, your nasal passages emit more mucus because of the dry air, Which gives you the tendency to touch your nose and want to wipe your nose, which doesn't obviously happen as much in the summer with the moister summer air, which makes it a better transport environment as well to kind of inject that right into your nasal passages.
Again, any veracity to that?
That it's not just the cold weather itself, but the cold weather's effect on the human body and what people do in response to it.
Yeah, exactly.
In addition, in the winter we all exist as little viral replicators.
In the summer, again, going from point A to point B, it's much harder to do.
One of these things touches a handrail, it's even 80 degrees outside.
That handrail in the sun is 120-130 degrees Fahrenheit.
These viruses last minutes at that temperature.
We're going to take a quick break.
We're talking to Dr. Chris Centeno from Regenexx, excuse me.
I'm going to post these terrific articles.
I strongly encourage you to read them up at the show notes.
Go to bongino.com slash newsletter.
I'll email you these articles.
They are worth your time.
We'll be right back.
Thanks for your patience, folks.
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Now back to our interview.
All right, welcome back.
We're talking to Dr. Chris Centeno from Regenexx.
Wrote two terrific pieces on the coronavirus facts versus fictions.
We're trying to calm the hysteria here with facts.
Again, ladies and gentlemen, a serious issue.
No doubt.
The question is, how serious?
A question from our studio audience, Doc.
I say that laughingly because it's my wife.
Um, who happens to have a chronic condition.
She gives me permission to talk about it, but people with conditions like say diabetes or lupus who may be healthy thirties, forties, fifties, are they high risk for this as well?
Or is their age kind of protect them?
Yeah, listen, I think if you've got, as an example, if you had COPD, which is emphysema, that's definitely going to put you in a high risk for this.
Now, the more that's treated, meaning the more treatment that requires, the bigger the risk.
If you had, if you were in your 30s and had type 2 diabetes, probably less risk.
But if you were in your 60s and had type 2 diabetes, more risk.
So if you look at that risk spectrum, there's one thing to point out here, and that was just today it was released that the Italian health system had said that in the 104 cases that they did postmortems on, the first 104 cases, Not only were they elderly, as I've already said, or the old elderly.
In addition, more than two-thirds had at least two chronic life-threatening conditions.
So these really were not, based on that report, healthy people.
These were people who were sort of on the edge on a day-to-day basis.
So, very different from a 30-year-old who has type 2 diabetes.
Doc, what is your impression of what's going on in Italy?
Obviously not being there, but having read what's going on and looking at some of the data coming out of Italy.
You address it again in one of your pieces at Regenexx.com, but you address the fact that this has become the new kind of Again, hysterical, sometimes hyperbolic.
I know it's bad.
I'm not downplaying what's going on.
It's a very serious situation.
But again, they're painting it as a total Armageddon and a meltdown here for the entire country, and that's not helping us here gauge the severity of the threat for us.
What's your impression of what's going on in Italy and what the real issue is over there with the hospitals?
Do they have enough equipment?
Is it an equipment issue?
Is it a social situation?
I know in Italy people tend to kiss each other on the cheek.
That was posted in one of the articles.
What's your impression of what's going on over there?
Yeah, listen, I think we should all pray for the people in Italy because they definitely have it bad.
I think what's happening over there right now is that they got in a situation where they weren't prepared and they are running out of ICU and ventilator space.
Realize that here's what happens with this thing.
About 50% of the patients are just going to have some mild cold symptoms.
They may or may not even know they had this thing.
Then you're going to have another 30% to have some symptoms they feel like they have the flu.
Then you've got about 15 to 20% that get more ill and might need some help.
And then near as I can tell based on looking at the Italy data, probably about 3% are going to need ICU care.
Now that's a lot of people if this thing spreads quite a bit.
I think that's really where they had a problem.
But if you look at South Korea, the fatality rate is 0.65%.
Germany, the fatality rate is 0.2%.
They're able to keep up with all that.
So if you can properly ventilate those people, most of those patients will do fine.
But that's, I think, the problem in Italy.
They have got too far along that curve, and they don't have enough ICU and ventilator care to really deal with the whole thing.
You know, it's interesting you bring that up.
I was reading a piece at medium.com.
I'll put in tomorrow's show notes, folks, for those of you interested in reading it.
I don't believe he's a doctor, but it's data-oriented and data is data.
I mean, you're free to write about whatever you'd like.
And it's an interesting piece.
And at the end, they kind of hinted what you were just suggesting, that if you can get a lid on this early, and they mentioned some countries which have had success in combating this, Taiwan being one of them.
Where they got a lid on this early, and the patients were quarantined, measures were taken, healthcare professionals were given the proper protective equipment to deal with it, and when they did it and put a lid on it and lowered that curve, that they were able to effectively treat the patients who were infected, which drove the death rate down.
So am I evaluating this correctly by saying that The death rate, given the appropriate initial response, which I believe we're doing everything we can in the United States, the death rate is largely contingent on how you get a lid on the top of that bell curve and keep the number of cases manageable.
Am I right?
Once it gets beyond manageable, you run out of simple, you know, things like equipment and respirators.
And then it becomes a matter of real grave importance because you start getting into things like triage, which nobody wants to think about.
Yeah, I think you're 100% right.
This is about the appropriate response.
Obviously, we've had an unprecedented response here.
I've never seen anything like this in my life at all.
And if you can get a lid on it, I think you can control it.
And I think that's what those countries have done.
So what do we need?
We need testing, we need ICU space, we need ventilators, we need healthcare workers that are protected.
One of the things that Colorado just did, which I thought was great because it was done in many of those countries over there, is they have now drive-in testing here.
So there's a drive-in testing center in Denver.
You can go in, you can get tested, make testing easy, and then take those people who are positive and put them in strict quarantine so you're 100% right.
We're talking to Dr. Chris Centeno again from Regenexx.
Doc, one of the things I addressed in my earlier show I had published on Thursday was, you know, I feel awful for Tom Hanks and his family.
Him and his wife apparently tested positive.
Rita Wilson and Tom Hanks, dreadful situation.
Pray for them.
I mean, very, very sad to hear.
Any case.
But I mentioned on my show today that I think the lack of information here, again, about this virus is what's causing a response not commensurate with the threat, which is making the situation worse.
And one of the things I brought up is if there's ever a silver lining to this dreadful situation, when you start to see people you know, maybe not personally, but you know, everyone knows who Tom Hanks is.
He's one of the most famous men in the world.
I said one of the best things that could happen is to see Tom Hanks in two weeks and his wife come out and God willing be healthy, have recovered, look good, feel good.
And listen, no one's asking for propaganda.
This isn't the Soviet Union here.
I'm just suggesting that I think the fatality rate and things when they're elevated, it creates It's misinformation that makes a bad situation worse.
And to have cases like this, for instance, I just saw a little while ago, before I started this interview with you, a patient on Fox News, Skype interview, 67 years old, has some other conditions, not life-threatening, but other conditions, but thankfully he's recovering and doing fine.
If you had a high fever, didn't feel good, obviously.
I think we need to see more of that.
To not to tell people don't take those measures, obviously take these precautions, but understand this isn't some death sentence.
I mean, do you agree that more cases like that, if we see it, we don't want them, but as we see people recover, it may start to give people a better grasp of what we're dealing with?
Yeah, I agree.
Think about what they did in wartime Britain.
There were those posters, you know, keep calm and carry on.
What were they trying to do?
They had to have those people do certain things.
The government needed them to do certain things, just like now.
But they also could not start a panic, because that would cause bigger problems.
So I think right now we need to thread that needle.
And Tom Hanks, yes, recovering would be a great way for everyone to see that, for the most part, this is not going to to kill you, but it needs to be taken very seriously. We
need, again, to get prepared, we need to social distance, we need to wash our hands, we
need to shut down gatherings, those sorts of things. But yeah, Tom Hanks, if he recovers,
would be a great way to put a lid on that panic. Yeah, we need to.
Can I ask you some medical-related questions?
Again, if you don't know the answer, that's fine.
I'm not asking you to speculate anything you don't know, but these are questions that all came from our audience.
Obviously, there's, you know, again, a lot of unknowns out there.
One of them, a friend of mine who emailed in said, is there any way you could get this from a box shipped from China?
Everybody's worried about, say, an Amazon shipment or delivery.
I mean, I get Amazon.
I think I'm like Amazon's largest stockholder out there.
I get Amazon boxes.
I'm kidding, obviously.
But they're out there every day.
Is that, I shouldn't say possible, that's a dumb question, I should say is it likely that you could get it somehow from a box?
I got the question, it'd be only fair to ask.
Yeah, well, certainly one ship from China.
Again, you have to think about how that works.
So number one is porous surfaces tend to be the worst at transmitting the virus.
So a box or paper is one of the hardest places for a virus to survive.
Why is that?
You know, I can't say I know for sure.
My guess would be is that most of the virus actually isn't on the surface.
It gets lodged in the Makes sense. Because the surfaces look like, you know, hair
or something, frizzy hair. So, but anyway, so coming from China, again, I think it's very
unlikely that that could cause transmission.
Now, could it happen from your local place in a one-day delivery scenario? Maybe, but if it's a
two-day delivery scenario, again, that virus is probably going to be dead because of that porous
And then you add in heat on top of that, you know, it gets even 80 degrees out there.
As you know, in a FedEx van, it's going to be 110 degrees back where the boxes are.
So all of that helps to mitigate.
I'm taking notes as we talk.
This is for me too, Doc.
This is one of the few shows where I'm interviewing you, but I'm an audience member too.
That's what I'm doing, man.
So if you see me writing with the pen, it's me actually taking notes.
Go for the two day delivery.
Don't do the one day.
You'd get away from Prime for a while.
Good advice.
Another question.
Is there a possibility that this could become seasonal like the flu?
I mean, we haven't seen, luckily, as far as I know, a reemergence of H1N1 in any dramatic fashion, but is there a way this becomes some kind of seasonal threat?
And although we get a lid on it now, it could come back.
Yeah, it's possible.
The 1918 pandemic did that.
It kind of goes into the southern hemisphere because they're sort of ramping up.
They're in their fall now, ramping up towards winter, so it's possible.
Obviously, there's more people flying around these days.
I think we'll have to really be careful with that.
But having said that, I think by the time the U.S.
is done with this and it sees what it takes to get a lid on this whole thing, we're going to be even more prepared next year than we would be right now.
Another question I got from our listeners, they emailed in about immunity.
If you get this virus, given that we know there are variants, apparently there's an L and an S version, and obviously there's always a potential for mutations.
If you get this virus, one variant, are you immune to other variants of it?
Or if it does become seasonal, do you have Partial immunity?
A little bit of immunity?
Do you get it, but just don't get it as severely?
Or is it one of those situations, I caught the flu this season, but I got the flu shot, and I'll be honest with you, I felt bad for two days, but it felt like a bad cold, not the flu.
So is that, what's, what, how does that work exactly?
Once you catch this, will you develop some sort of immunity?
Yeah, I don't think anyone knows yet.
I think it's too early to answer that question.
My sense would be that you would develop immunity, but you might only develop immunity to one type.
It's really too early to answer that one.
Okay, fair enough.
Final question, be very generous with your time.
We're talking to Dr. Chris Centeno from Regenexx.
Again, we'll post his articles up at Bongino.com.
I can't encourage you strongly enough terms to read them.
From your reading of the research out there and what's going on, what are the symptoms of this?
I should ask you this question first.
There's so much interesting things to ask you, so many interesting things.
But what's the difference from, say, a common cold, influenza?
I mean, obviously there's no You know, A or B, maybe, you know, maybe there's some crossover here, but is there one thing that would concern you most if you had, say, a spiking fever?
What is it that differentiates us from other seasonal illnesses we get?
Yeah, the biggest differentiator is, you know, as you know, if you get a cold or the flu, you usually have a runny nose, lots of congestion.
There's that big component.
If you have a cough, in addition, it's usually a productive cough.
It's producing something.
That's not the case here.
This is a dry cough and a fever that, if it gets severe, can move into shortness of breath.
So realize that we're talking about a dry cough and a fever.
So if you see someone with the sniffles, they probably don't have coronavirus.
They probably have a cold.
But if you've got a dry cough and a fever and you develop any kind of shortness of breath,
then you've got to see your doctor.
And if you've just got a dry cough and a fever, go see your family doctor.
He or she can decide if you need to be tested.
And if you need to be tested, great, get that test.
And if it turns out positive, obey the strict quarantine because that's going to be absolutely necessary to control this thing.
I know I said that was my last question, but I'm sorry.
You're very interesting.
So I have one more.
My wife's like, keep it going.
She's loving this.
She's taking notes over there, too.
Have you seen anything?
I'm not asking you for snake oil potions or, you know, nonsense stuff.
But have you seen any data out there about any over-the-counter mitigation measures that may help?
You know, I've seen stories.
And the reason I ask this, Doc, is there's obviously there's always people who leverage a crisis for all the wrong reasons.
And it's a shame.
But, you know, I'm just, I'm a dad and I'm a husband too, outside of being a host.
And I see things like, well, you know, take your vitamin C and is any of that stuff work?
Or is it just say, take it for good health and being healthy will work, but it's not necessarily going to make the situation any better.
In your medical opinion, any of that stuff work?
Yeah, listen, take that stuff for good health, but I haven't seen anything that shows that that would help.
Interestingly enough, though, there was a, again, another pre-publication paper, because it's not enough time to get this stuff through the publication process, so take this for what it's worth.
Because it wasn't peer-reviewed, but there were some Chinese doctors that were using umbilical cord stem cells.
So these were human umbilical cord stem cells that had been culture-expanded, and they reported an amazing response in one patient, that's all they reported on, who was literally on her deathbed.
They'd written her off, so they got approval to do it.
And within three days she was back walking around.
So that has a lot of promise, that concept that you might be able to do an IV infusion of mesenchymal stem cells which can help to control inflammation.
The problem there is the regulatory approval to do it in this country might be much more difficult, but if this gets bad then we might see those types of trials ongoing.
That's fascinating because I am a recipient of multiple stem cell injections myself from a friend of mine, a doctor out in Los Angeles, that really, I have severe arthritis in my shoulder and was told I needed a shoulder replacement.
I have now saved my butt a few times, bought at least five more years out of that shoulder with stem cells.
Is that because of the anti-inflammatory properties of the stem cells, which keeps the lung inflammation down?
Is that what they think may be assisting there?
That's what they thought, yeah.
I mean, the biggest problem here is you get this interstitial viral pneumonia with a ton of inflammation, and if you can control that inflammation, then you can get the person to the other side.
Just to be clear for the audience too, Doc, in the interest of disclosure, GenX does do stem cells.
I don't want anybody to be confused about, but this was not a paid advertisement or anything like that.
We don't do anything like that.
We do orthopedic work only, you know, shoulders, knees, spines.
So I have no plans on treating any of these patients.
No, but that's fascinating data.
And again, I say it because I was the recipient of stem cells into my shoulder and my knee and my wife had torn her meniscus and didn't want to have surgery and was treated with stem cells too.
And it was pretty miraculous.
I talk about it actually a lot on my show.
So, Doc, thank you so much for your time.
This has been invaluable.
I have a couple pages of notes myself about things I wrote down here.
I really appreciate it.
I will be sure to post your articles.
Dr. Chris Centeno, thanks again from Regenexx.
Really appreciate your time.
I hope to talk to you again soon.
That was fantastic.
Thank you.
You just heard the Dan Bongino Show.
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