Cancer Patients with Asymptomatic or Mild COVID Should Be on High Alert
Many cancer patients were almost asymptomatic during the COVID infection peak, and those with symptoms had only mild ones; many of these patients had not been vaccinated. But I now find that some of the cancer patients I treat begin to develop symptoms only some time after their household contacts fall ill—in some cases even a month later—and once symptoms appear, they are almost always severe. Some cancer patients die within two or three days after symptoms appear.I previously found this phenomenon hard to understand, but after a period of observation and study, I found it is related to cancer patients' extremely poor immunity. Their immune systems cannot recognize the virus in the early stage of invasion as a normal person's can. In normal people, fever, headache, and sore throat are all normal immune responses after viral invasion; through effective immune response the body maintains internal homeostasis. But because cancer patients' immune systems no longer function normally, their immune responses are very mild, which makes them "asymptomatic infected persons."However, these "asymptomatic infected persons" should be treated with the highest alert. They usually develop symptoms in the second or third week; the lower the immunity, the later symptoms may appear. Once symptoms appear, the organs have usually already been damaged, so the condition is very severe and extremely hard to rescue.At the start of this first wave of mass infection, we did not recognize this phenomenon, causing many cancer patients to miss the best treatment window—the first five days after infection are most effective. After missing the first five days, subsequent treatment becomes very thorny and the probability of success much lower.I myself only recently discovered this phenomenon: when many cancer patients' household contacts fell ill, the cancer patients themselves were fine. Because many cancer patients were unvaccinated, folk wisdom even spread that unvaccinated people generally have mild infections. In fact, mild or even asymptomatic infection is not necessarily a good thing; mild symptoms show that the immune system lacks the ability to recognize the virus and rise up against it.For elderly people and immunocompromised chronic-disease patients, the earlier symptoms appear after infection, the better. Early symptoms allow early treatment; those without symptoms tend to be overlooked. The virus reproduces in secret in these patients, and once it reaches a certain load, it directly damages their organs, producing severe symptoms—by which time medication is already too late.In fact, some patients are not truly asymptomatic; their symptoms are just hidden and hard to detect. For example, some patients have neither fever, body ache, nor headache, but only itchy skin, numb hands and feet, or gastrointestinal discomfort, and they mistake these for other causes.I have now seen 5 cancer patients whose presenting symptom after COVID was itchy skin, and 2 whose presenting symptom was numb hands and feet. But because these are not typical post-COVID symptoms and are easily confused with side effects of many anticancer drugs, they are extremely easily overlooked by patients and their families. If treated late, such patients usually go on to become severe cases.COVID causes greater damage to cancer patients of the hematological, neurological, and lymphatic systems than to other cancer patients, but its effect on patients in remission seems less obvious; it mainly affects patients with progressive cancer. I have over a thousand families of neuroblastoma patients in my WeChat contacts; through their consultations I have found that, during this period, the neurons of neuroblastoma children under integrated TCM-Western treatment have been hard to control, and leukemia and lymphoma patients' conditions have also progressed rapidly.Of course, other cancer patients have also been greatly affected; some patients with tumor complications (such as intestinal obstruction, pleural effusion, ascites, radiation enteritis, etc.) have seen those complications worsen and become very thorny to manage. Some Hong Kong scholars have found that the gut microbiota has a large influence on COVID prognosis; patients with fewer gut probiotics have worse prognoses. So cancer patients with prior gut problems should promptly supplement probiotics.Although ordinary people mostly no longer take antigen or PCR tests, I still advise cancer patients and their families to keep taking PCR and antigen tests. Once a positive result appears, whether or not the patient has symptoms, antiviral treatment should be started promptly. Cancer patients also belong to the group of silent COVID infected persons; if they are not carefully protected, their risk of death is very high.In addition, cancer patients who had side effects after the first vaccine dose and abandoned subsequent vaccinations, once infected with COVID, have as their most typical symptoms exactly the side effects they had after vaccination—but far more severely.A biliary-tract tumor patient in Dalian whom I treat had whole-body pain after vaccination, but after COVID infection the pain was far worse than after vaccination; another lung-cancer patient had skin allergy after vaccination, but after COVID infection a large patch of skin turned scorchingly black. Vaccine side effects are easy to manage; symptoms after infection with live virus are hard to manage, so I still advise cancer patients to be vaccinated in the future.We have seen that vaccination caused almost no deaths, but after this first wave of infection, many people died; I believe everyone can feel this from the deaths around them.So the risk of vaccination is far lower than the risk of infection, and the protective effect of vaccination cannot be ignored. The fact that vaccinated people develop obvious symptoms after infection is precisely a good thing: it shows their immune response is normal. Although these people have strong bodily reactions, their risk of death is much lower; the truly frightening ones are the silent infected persons.