shoshin

That’s a Trump/CDC requirement too. Other states are pretty much ignoring it but it originated from the top and is an important piece to have in place. @B-Man the Roger Simon piece is an interesting social commentary. I didn’t want to quote it al but I just wanted to thank you for sharing it. It is meta to post it in a place like this where the moral lecturers are the dominant breed.

Like the data but the sentiment is not one nation under god indivisible (nor were the “floridamorons” people). New York is much different than Florida and we are all in this I would hope rooting for everyone to succeed.

10K in a controlled biological blood drawing study is not small. Sure 1M would be better but that would take an army of people to administer and you wouldn’t get the results for 9 months.

10,000 person NIH study underway to determine spread. Take your blood and some phone surveys. The results of this will be important to chart spread.

****** When the vaccine comes, let’s assume states require it for kids and certain jobs. Maybe travel requirements too. Do you think we are strong enough to all band together and take it as a whole like we did with smallpox? I see anti-vaccine, anti-mask, magical non-science thinking (who needs scientific studies of drug treatments when we have anecdotes?) and I wonder. I hope we can but I do wonder.

When I was at Merck, I saw the time and money and dedication that truly brilliant and good people put in for 3-10 years only to see their hard work disappear in a proper study. It was heartbreaking. That’s why we do the studies. Smart dedicated people’s hopes and the $$ invested need verification. And those failed study moments are money the companies just lose. Reality sees Gilead as a villain in this. There is a newish anti-big-business sect. It’s a leftist message dressed up in right-wing conspiracy language that has rightish mass appeal because of its revolution undertone. A strange left-right bedfellow that neither side would ever admit.

Another promising treatment study. A cocktail of several somewhat readily available drugs. Patients hospitalized with COVID-19 who received a combination therapy with three antivirals -- protease inhibitor lopinavir-ritonavir (Kaletra), nucleoside analogue ribavirin, and injectable interferon beta-1b (Betaseron, Extavia) -- showed significantly shorter median time to a negative SARS-CoV-2 test versus controls, a small phase II trial found.

Just one mention of percent positive. A lot more mentions about how good the Trump guidelines are everywhere in my posts. In other data news, though we have been much slower to decline on deaths than other countries, fingers crossed that we are actually on the downslope finally. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/

I’m not sure what you’re trying to say. I’ve promoted the CDC guidelines and the gates to move between phases since day one. And % positive specifically. It’s one of the key measurements of that plan because it recognized that more tests would mean more cases. Not rocket science.

Nope. I’ve mentioned it here a bunch of times. % positive is one of the CDC gates. And yes we need more testing too, but mostly the serology tests. Those are vital.

It's literally in the CDC guidelines as one of the keys to open the gate to the next opening phase.

There have been studies of hydrochloroquine. They didn't show what we would want. The only evidence of HCQ so far is anecdotal, meaning, it's not measuring up to the actual science. I wish it wasn't true too but it is. I could not agree more with this. Levine is ignoring the CDC guidelines and has set a completely arbitrary line that counties have to meet. That line doesn't take into account the hospital capacity of a county, the availability of beds, testing positive % decreasing even as test #s increase. It's just: Hit the "50" number. She makes me mental. In her defense, the Physician General of a state is usually a throwaway job, so she's getting her moment in the sun and believes she's up to it based on her experience as " Chief of the Division of Adolescent Medicine and Eating Disorders at the Penn State Hershey Medical Center." She's as qualified to make epidemiology decisions as Trump is to offer research theories on injecting surface disinfectants. I think Wolf is smart but he's unwilling to make a slightly more aggressive decision. ***** him.

I wasn't attacking you. I'm saying Trump called for the shutdown, as did most governors. If you don't like it or don't think it's worth it, remember that in November.

15 cases too. Lots of 15s.

Yep. If you hate the shutdown, hate the president and the governors. They all wanted it.

Read the whole thing; though note how the media is distorting the responses of New York and Florida’s governors: For any state in the US to say, "We did something right because we did better than NYC" is ridiculous. No place in the US is like NYC.

With the talk lately about how younger Covid patients are having more strokes and clots than expected, here's some interesting preliminary data on using blood thinners for them. It's just a data study but among the sickest patients (those on ventilators...meaning their chances are already very low for survival), the results here are pretty significant. Among [2800 age 33-49] patients placed on ventilators, nearly 63% of those who weren't treated with blood thinners died, compared with 29% of those who were given the drugs, the researchers reported. Among patients on ventilators who died, those who didn't receive blood thinners died after nine days, while those given the drugs died after 21 days. More here. Need more research on this but that's a promising result (though it's kind of obvious to go to blood thinners for stroke/clots).

He has talked about it a lot pushing people to register for mail in ballots. Gotta be a party member for it to matter. Health Sec Levine is being absurdly cautious and has his ear. Don't be shocked if she pushes him to extend the shutdown further. Philly is 8x and most other counties are 4X the threshold she set for opening.

What he announced is that some parts of PA (including the Philly area notably) will remain closed until at least June 4. He did not say it's reopening June 4, which pisses me off.

It was a funny take, not a serious one. We are reopening. Hopefully we can keep R0 at 1.

You and Reality just contributed 6+ more posts to the nonsense you allegedly hoped to stop. Eye plank. In COVID news, let's look at porn for leadership for test and trace. And there's also this [funny that C-men is censored]:

There won’t be any crushing a curve. Cases and deaths will rise with more people mingling. There can’t be another result of reopening at this point. Tracking is critical to letting people know they’ve been exposed and need to isolate until tested. That’s true even now. Ideally it’s used to stamp out outbreaks but we have given up on keeping the majority of people safe from this. The new unstated (for obvious reasons) goal is to hope for a few hundred thousand deaths to achieve herd immunity by summer 2021.

They were hopeful because it’s a broad spectrum antiviral with minimal side effects. But much like chloroquine worked well in the lab and anecdotally vs Ebola and HIV, the hype here appears to fizzle under testing. It would be amazing if a drug as known as chloroquine worked but it’s like the NYC hospital Pepcid tests, doesn’t seem like that’s happening. Not double blind and some flaws there with only testing it in more advanced patients but it’s not anecdotal either.

Having patients lie on their sides and stomachs also seems to have a great effect--it's one of the big things we learned for positive outcomes and I don't think anyone gets a royalty for figuring that out. There are some experiments using old TB and Polio drugs that look promising. All of those like chloroquine are off patent. If they show promise, I'm sure they will be used.

I'd love to read a study that says HCQ works but anecdotes about how people took it and got better are not studies, especially for a disease where most people get better. So far there haven't been any double blind studies that show good results, and even the thing you quoted admits that the only studies have shown negative results. Given the length of time since we started hearing about HCQ, its ready availability, and the number of patients receiving it, if there was a massive advantage to taking HCQ we'd know about it. Even the politicians have backed off talking about it but it remains alive on message boards! Remdesivir looks way more promising but sadly it's going to be less available. Some other treatments may show promise soon too. You can track the science on Statnews's treatment and vaccine tracker. It's not anecdotal and you can dig deeper on studies using that as a jumping-off point. I don't fault them for tossing a relatively harm-free Hail Mary out there and proscribing HCQ sometimes but there's no evidence to back that action up.