Is it time to turn back in time to treat novel COVID-19 disease? -current situation in Nepal

Nabin Narayan Munankarmi, and Rabindra Karki

Nepal is a country where seasonal flu and common cold are commonly observed as a yearly episode. Since historic time, we as a Nepalese have been accustomed to treat this illness with simple treatment of hot steam and herbal medicines. Now over a year has passed and although we have handful of vaccines and drugs at hand some have still question regarding safety and efficacy to tackle the new variants that arise frequently. The situation has been aggravated by a bitter fact that access to vaccine doses and procurement to all population is still a sweet dream that every Household has at disposal to live with currently.

With around 2.2% of the population being vaccinated till date (5/27/2021) in Nepal, and around 12 vaccines being approved for administration (Normal and Emergency) globally, the day when all the people in the world will get vaccinated seems to take at least a year [1, 2]. The big question here is what should people in countries like Nepal do during the mean time? Should we try something instead or are we missing something?

Steam treatment (that has been traditionally successful to cure respiratory illness) can fight all these respiratory viruses no matter how many times they mutate. The mechanism by which this treatment works is independent of genetic polymorphism. These viruses enter the cell by a lock and a key model. And when the steam is inhaled or hot water is in taken, it is assumed that the spike proteins or the key part gets denatured and there occurs no perfect fit between the key and the lock (Angiotensinogen converting enyme-2,ACE-2). Further, use of steam has also been verified to be effective in the treatment of COVID-19 in a recent trial in Italy [3]. Use of heat for treatment of COVID-19 has also been suggested in similar other studies [4].

Hence while the world is racing in for the turn to get vaccinated or development of new vaccines or drug therapies, it seems at home we could try to manage SARSCOV-2 virus or COVID-19 virus by a similar manner as any other respiratory viruses. As soon as you start to have some symptoms of COVID-19, start hot water steam inhalation, drink plenty of hot lemon, ginger tea or water and feed on noodles and chicken mushroom soup frequently until the symptoms are gone. This is how we Nepalese people deal with common cold and other respiratory viruses at home.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

The authors did not receive any funding for this study.

Competing interests:The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Citation:Munankarmi NN, Karki R. Is it time to turn back in time to treat novel COVID-19 disease? -current situation in Nepal. Precision Medicine Research. 2021;3(3):14. doi: 10.53388/PMR2021080201.

Executive editor:Na Liu, Jin-Feng Liu.

Submitted:02 August 2021,Accepted:19 August 2021,Online:06 September 2021

© 2021 By Authors. Published by TMR Publishing Group Limited. This is an open access article under the CC-BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/BY/4.0/)