Well, you can believe what you want to Jed,
But no sane human being in the history of history would EVER inject disinfectant into their bodies.
Under no circumstances, except political ones, should that have been taken seriously.
People do it. Just google it as a remedy and you will see lots of recommendations on it. Here is a story of a guy who drank a disinfectant:
https://www.medpagetoday.com/infectiousdisease/covid19/86094
And here is a story of a lot of people doing it in Iran:
Display MorePerhaps of interest --
COVID-19 and Ivermectin, We Finally Have Some Clinical Trial Data!
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Hopefully, ivermectin will not be politicized by The Media.
Thanks for the video. I am not sure ivermectin will get politicized. It’s a pretty straightforward drug that people use for head lice and has been around a long time.
I like how the study shows a reduction in mortality with people on ventilators. Working drugs should show some benefit at all stages of illness. The question is what dosage of ivermectin is needed to really be effective, and is it so much that it could produce severe side effects? It just needs more clinical trials and testing, which is happening now.
I think we will see a large amount of clinical trial results on different drugs in late May and early June - including some NIH studies. That’s going to be an interesting time.
ugh, not the best news on remdesivir. Still needs more trials, but it’s sounds like it’s pretty questionable at the moment.
“The Financial Times said — citing documents accidentally published by the World Health Organization — that Gilead Sciences’ drug remdesivir did not improve patients’ condition or reduce the coronavirus pathogen in their bloodstream. Those findings, according to the report, came from a clinical trial in China.
The S&P 500 and Nasdaq Composite also cut their gains on the report, while Gilead was briefly halted for volatility.
But the major averages then rebounded after Gilead took issue with the report, saying: “Because this study was terminated early due to low enrollment, it was underpowered to enable statistically meaningful conclusions. As such, the study results are inconclusive, though trends in the data suggest a potential benefit for remdesivir, particularly among patients treated early in disease.
The report and Gilead’s subsequent statement came a week after STAT News reported that Chicago patients taking remdesivir to treat coronavirus were recovering rapidly from severe virus symptoms. That report lifted market sentiment, sending stock sharply higher.”
Display MoreThe daily new case graphs are not symmetric. Several people have noted this. Here is an article by a professor of pediatrics about this:
It’s Too Soon to Reopen States. The Coronavirus Is Not Under Control.
Leaders are overestimating how far we’ve come and are underestimating what it will take to manage Covid-19 in a near-normal world.
I agree, without a really strong national system of testing, tracing and containing (like South Korea is doing below) what would drive the confidence in reopening and just hoping that things somehow get better. Denial, wishful thinking? Maybe the virus will die down a bit when the summer hits and it’s 90 degrees out. Let’s hope.
The U.S. has to test a lot more people than South Korea, so we have a bigger task ahead of us for widespread testing. But why isn’t the Federal Government in the U.S. going all out right now to set up a national agency for testing and tracing to be carried out locally by the States? Do people think it would be too much money to create it? We are losing billions in GDP weekly. So a national agency will pay for itself by getting the economy on better footing faster.
Like in the Brazilian study, why wait until the patients are half-dead on ventilators before giving them anti-viral therapy. Generally in Europe and specifically Zelenko's trials involve treatment at a very early stage in the illness before significant disease pathology has occurred. More about that other scoundrel Didier Raoult, and
at last somebody else on the planet has made the correlation between anti-malarial drug use of mefloquine and chloroquine and very few numbers of COVID-19 cases and fatalities!
I’m sorry Dr. Richard I can’t hang with you on the chloroquine as a treatment anymore. This hydroxychloriquine study below is a brutal one in terms of its viability. Perhaps chloroquine is better than hydroxy, but at this point I don’t know why either should be considered as part of antiviral remedy any more than anything else. Remdesivir is the one that has shown some benefit so far. There are lots of other antivirals being looked at. I thought HIV antivirals would show some benefit. But the only one so far is remdesivir - a failed antiviral for Ebola. And it’s still too early to know if it truly works, although I would have no reservations taking it (or recommending a family member take it) under compassionate use. The only other thing I would consider is plasma from someone who already had it. But that’s not easy to get at the moment.
I also just don’t buy into the concept that the antiviral only works if administered earlier. Antivirals typically show some benefit even when a person has severe symptoms. Perhaps they will not fully recover, but there should be some benefit to using it at all stages of infection.
Another interesting story on what the actual number of infections may be:
1. Obviously could be a positive in terms of the actual mortality rate
2. But if it’s true, it’s mind boggling how quickly the virus has run through the population.
The reservoir is large enough. In the U.S. there have been 2,200 cases per million officially recorded. Assume that is an order of magnitude too low. That is still only 2% of the population. In New York City it may be higher, but in most places it is lower still, because so many cases are in New York.
In other words, so far ~2% of the population has been infected and 39,000 people have died. Herd immunity takes roughly 60% of the population. That's 30 times more infections. There is no reason to think the mortality rate will be much lower for the next 58% of the population, so that would be roughly 30 * 39,000 = 1,170,000 best case. That is assuming the infections come slowly and the hospitals are not overwhelmed.
Because that would be mass murder.
Not to be a downer, but I think a bigger part of the story in the coming weeks will be the chronic health problems many people are left with who got sick from the virus. This article outlines them. There are also reports now of Doctors in several places scrambling for dialysis machines because of kidney failure:
https://www.jpost.com/health-s…-body-doctors-fear-625099
And here is a story about a Broadway actor who is having his leg amputated because of his illness.
https://www.spiked-online.com/…he-lockdowns-are-working/
Slowly, but surely, sanity is beginning to enter into the debate, and those experts with other opinions listened to. These comments are from the interview with John Lee (NHS Consultant Pathologist). He makes a good observation on the media, but did not copy here:
I still don’t think there is any magic wand for someone to wave to change the current economic situation. Planes are currently flying, but they are empty. Hotels are open in some places, but no one is staying at them. If someone opened their neighborhood restaurant tomorrow for people to come eat there, I imagine few people would show up.
While most people aren’t doing Jed’s math with the 1.3 multiplier, people instinctively know that if they go out into public they may get sick. People have to go to the grocery store to get food, but most now in my area are wearing a mask. So that tells me no one is excited to be there. It’s just about doing what’s necessary to get by right now. Do people want to sit in a sports arena or a movie theater wearing a mask?
If the Government did widespread testing to see who has immunity, and people could show proof of immunity, that could change the situation. But right now the U.S. is testing about 140k people per day. Widespread testing would need to ramp up to a million plus tests per day. So a long way to go there. Companies are working towards that, but it still months away.
Also, because the virus is new, doctors don’t know yet what immunity means. Someone could have gotten a mild case of Covid19 this month, and could possibly get it again next winter. No one is sure that immunity means lifetime immunity yet. The majority of what I read is not to expect lifetime immunity, unless the person got a severe case of it.
Another remdesivir study below showing some positive effects in monkeys. Is it too early to say that remdesivir works on some level? Definitely. There needs to be more studies with control groups etc. That will take a couple of months at least. But there are reasons to be hopeful.
The probability of a single drug sitting on the shelf being a cure-all with this virus is low, including remdesivir. Viruses are different, and antiviral therapies take years to develop to fight them. If we get there we are probably looking at a cocktail of several drugs working together to be effective. Maybe remdesivir is one of them.
If I had to wager $100 on when a safe working vaccine is going to be administered to the general population my guess would be 2 to 2.5 years from today. So longer than the 12-18 months we hear every day. A lot of the technologies that underline getting a vaccine in that short of a time period are still unproven. So I think antivirals are our short term way back to some kind of normalcy.
Well this is some good news. Remdesivir appears to be hanging in there with its clinical trials.
The key part of this in my mind is that it is showing effectiveness on severe patients. That’s what we want to see, an antiviral working on people with severe symptoms. That is a good sign.
Gilead’s stock is going through the roof in after hours trading. So people like what they see here.
Absolutely not. No sane person would return to ordinary life when 300,000 people a month are become seriously ill, 60,000 are hospitalized, and 6,000 are dying. That's 72,000 deaths a year, like a good-sized war. The hospitals would be continuously full, with hallways and atriums and emergency facilities in other parts of the city filled. Ordinary elective surgery would be impossible. People with other conditions such as heart problems would die.
I think that is where my pessimism lies, at least for those of us in the U.S. We had 30k new cases today (of course those are the cases where someone presented symptoms that would lead to being tested). To get that number down to 10k, or even below 10k is going to be a major challenge that will take time. Even at 10k most people will not feel safe going out into society.
If everyone is forced to wear masks with other social distancing rules then I think it’s possible to get people to feel somewhat safe. NY is trying that. But we will see how it goes. The last month was tough, but I think this next month is when people will start to get restless, irritated and uncomfortable, unless our Government wants to go towards some type of universal basic income until the numbers come down drastically. I think something along these lines will be discussed more seriously as an option in the coming weeks as well.
Display MoreSocial distancing seems to be working, but it seems to be taking longer than some models predict. The decline is not as dramatic. For example, at healthdata.org for Italy, the second graph shows "19 days since projected peak in daily deaths." It shows actual data up to April 12, when there were 431 deaths. From there, the model drops to 160 today, with a range of 71 - 321. Unfortunately, the total for today is 578.
For April 13, 14 and 15 the actual totals are: 566, 602, 578. Projected: 261, 192, 160.
Here is the projection for Italy:
I think there is a reason for concern that while social distancing is beneficial, it has its limits, and can’t go on forever. Can the U.S. reopen the economy with a fairly constant number of 10,000 new cases per day?
10k new cases is a major improvement over where we are now. But I could see a scenario where we kind of get stuck there for months.
The only two things that I think could significantly lower the number of new cases beyond that are:
1. A general requirement that people wear masks outside their homes. This wouldn’t just be for the grocery store, but people would have to wear them at their places of business, and kids would wear them in school etc. I am not sure Western society is ready for something like this. But I won’t be surprised if it becomes more of the conversation soon because it may be impossible to reopen the economy in a meaningful way without having everyone wear a mask.
2. The Governor of each State needs to create testing SWAT teams. So if someone tests positive in a particular place they can go in fast and test everyone and do contact tracing.
call me pessimistic but I don’t think the outbreak is going to fade down to a negligible number on its own. This could just be how life goes for the next couple of years.
Personally (just my gut feeling) it was not done purposely as a weapon. It was just sloppiness. My degree is in molecular biophysics, but I left that when I saw what the labs were really like. I did not want to be a part of that- big pharm directed and suppressed work, sloppy lab safety, unskilled untrained people doing things that make for bad dreams...…. not conspiracy, just plain old incompetence- it is everywhere.
Perhaps the scientists in China near Wuhan who went into the caves to retrieve the bats that likely contained COVID-19 could have been doing it with good intentions. They wanted to study them for beneficial reasons. But their sloppiness caused it to pass to humans in the lab. There are also stories that labs in China who study bats go on to sell them to wet markets for consumption once they are done experimenting with them. I don’t know if that’s true.
Bats contain many coronaviruses that don’t pass to humans (see article below), and they also have ones that infect people but don’t cause illness. Some scientists believe that Covid-19 passed from a bat to a human years ago, but it was only noticed recently because it mutated to a strain that caused people to get sick.
just for a good reference, here is a list of antiviral and vaccine trials compiled in a Reuters article yesterday.
An interesting read about the confusion over using ventilators and low oxygen. Seems like Doctors are still trying to make sense of it. Perhaps a bunch of ventilators are currently being manufactured that won’t end up being used.
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Anyone see any holes in my strategy? Keeping in mind I am not trying to get sick.
I think we could be in a better place 6-8 months from now. So I would rather for me or my family go through being infected then than now all things considered. Below are some quotes from an article regarding clinical trials of existing antiviral medications. There are dozens of them taking place. There are a lot of drugs sitting on the shelf that were developed for HIV, Ebola, SARS etc. COVID has certain different things in common with these viruses. Maybe we get lucky and some existing drugs show some benefit.
Personally I think having a safe, working vaccine in 18 months sounds ambitious. It wouldn’t shock me if it took 2-3 years. But we would feel better in the meantime if there is a drug regimen that can keep people off ventilators or being intubated. Maybe people would still get sick but the drugs would keep the severity of the illness down.
From an article on clinical trials of existing antivirals:
“I am actually quite optimistic we will have results at least – whether the results are good or not so good – from many clinical trials in the next few weeks,” said Sharon Lewin, director of the Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity.
“The timeline for antiviral drugs and knowing whether they work or not is much shorter than for vaccines,” Lewin told reporters in Melbourne on Monday.
“Because these studies are using existing drugs, so we know their safety, we know how to use them. We just don’t know if they lead to clinical benefit.”
It feels like a tinge of optimism is taking hold in the U.S. Gov. Cuomo said he thinks the worst could be behind NYC, and they are talking about a staged reopening of businesses.
Having only glanced briefly below at the daily new cases I see some cause for concern, namely China and Singapore. China had 30 daily new cases on April 4th and today it has 108. It could just be a random blip on the radar. But we certainly don’t want to see that number continue to increase at that rate. It would point to how difficult it is to reopen an economy. Also, tens of thousands of people left Wuhan recently. We will see what effect that had.
Singapore is also seeing substantial growth in daily new cases despite being as proactive on testing as anyone, and being a very small country. Not sure what to make of it.
South Korea is the one Country that gets an A+ for how they are managing this. They have managed this as well as anyone and their cases always seem under control. My guess is they must have an amazing system of testing and contact tracing there.
It’s interesting how the experiences of 2 different events, 9/11 and this one, have felt so different from a top down control situation and who controls personal freedoms. In 9/11 it was the Patriot Act and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and a huge buildup of the military. It felt like everything was happening at the Federal level.
With this situation it has all been about the Governor of my State. I never gave much thought to what my Governor did on a day-to-day basis. But in something like this the Governor of a State becomes a very powerful figure and can basically do whatever they want. And they can use the National Guard, which is the military, to enforce it. Fortunately the Governor of my State has acted quite well in all of this, and we have not had an outbreak at the level that some others are experiencing.
Right, but this is just an engineering problem. The big news is that these are huge numbers, that should definitely rule out "experimental mistakes".
The only, improbable, alternative possibility is that of plain fraud.
It’s actually a pretty well written validation report. But still an ongoing mixed bag with BrLP. If I had 2 cents of advice to give them I would say to use all of their resources into increasing the time of the reaction. Don’t try to increase COP, don’t get bogged down on the engineering of different power systems etc. All of this soaks up time, money and brain cells.
So Just try to double the time of the current reaction, and when that happens, try to double it again. If they can get the reaction to a point where it lasts for many minutes, or even hours without overheating, the money and engineering talent will come in to figure out the rest of it. But it’s been 20 plus years at this, so they should conserve resources and focus on one engineering challenge right now. If they can pull it off the other problems will get solved.
Either remdesivir is not very effective for severe COVID-19 or it needs an added medication or the dose was not optimal. Uncontrolled study. I think studies with a control group are being done but take longer.
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2007016?query=RP
Here is an article today with a semi-positive spin on it. Perhaps it can be added to a cocktail with some other anti-virals.
