Coronavirus in the United States - news and thoughts

Exactly. I work remotely for a MSP and my wife works remotely for a cancer specialist. If anything, Im even more busy with less impact financially. However, there are a lot of people out of work who won't benefit from that anytime soon even if they can go find a job at this time. Just another reason why Trump is an idiot.

 

I don't think this debate is still ongoing. The flu itself isn't that deadly. The flu plus pneumonia is much more fatal. Covid-19 looks to be far surpassing a years fatalities for flu + pneumonia in less than 3 months.

Even most of the conservative radio personalities I listen to on occasion don't dispute that anymore. They may talk about the mortality being less or much less than the initial 3.4% or 2% originally speculated but they admit it's significantly worse than the flu. Maybe if there were no current therapies for Flu/Pneumonia and no one had any prior immunity it might be much closer.

 

honestly, g8g8 has been fairly balanced throughout this entire ordeal on these boards. Ease up on my boy blue!

 

Death is a reality of life. Once again, I didn't "characterize" to "HIDE OR LET PEOPLE DIE". Although it is a fairly reasonable assumption that people will die and in the end there are literally thousands of ways for that too happen. News flash, the virus isn't the sole reason for death. Please read on:

Dumb is your suggestion that walking around without a mask and knowing you "may" be sick (seems that the terms "knowing" and "may" clash, you think) deserves manslaughter charges! Oh my! Then where are you lets say, every year of your life when people in the US get the flu? People walk around throwing up and coughing and running the fever and I am going to suggest that you had no idea these facts: Just in 2019-2020 there were an estimated (by CDC) 39 to 56 million illnesses (lots of opportunity for manslaughter charges there), 18-26 million doctors visits for the flu, 410,000 to 740,000 hospitalizations and 24,000 to 62,000 people died (of which none were preventable). Where were you and your social distancing and mask wearing? These calculations are only from October through May (the supposed flu season). Globally the flu kills between 300,00 to 650,000 people every year.
Please do tell me where you have been keeping your face masks and how was that social distancing thing going through all these flu epidemics? Interested to hear your take on this.

 

Death rate 8% with drug, 11% with placebo. Statistically insignificant.

Symptoms 11 days with drug, 15 days with placebo.

Best case is it establishes proof of concept that virus can be impacted by a drug.

 

As you said, lets let DOCTORS evaluate it. Fauci likes it. Much better judge of it than you are. I'll go with his view. Thanks.

 

Gonna get very ugly. Honestly they may as well crank up UBI.

 

That looks positive to me.

Just not something we should be jumping for joy over. No panacea and not significant enough to make an impact on opening things up.

 

Wasn't it just given to patients already in serious condition? Are they doing any studies on people who have just been admitted etc?

 

Not sure. But if I or a loved one were in serious condition, I'd certainly want to have access to that treatment.

 

Those are pretty encouraging results IMO, that's better mortality benefit than blood pressure control, for example. Just that we now have evidence something works against this virus is pretty damn encouraging.

Now, I obviously don't know the details about the study, but it's a much larger study than the one in China. Dr. Fauci seems to like it, so its design must have been solid. It also likely had more selective enrollment criteria than the Chinese study, so we should also have a better sense of which population may benefit the most from this study.

 

Provided there are no serious side effects, like was the concern with Hydroxychlorquin with the known heart issues. If there are serious side effects, a 5% improvement might not be enough, because the serious side effects might show in >5%. If Fauci said to go forward with this drug, I will assume those concerns are addressed (unless Trump forced him to pimp another miracle cure, but I'll just have to keep faith Fauci wouldn't stoop to that level).

In either case it's really just a "step 1". Fauci said they can now test it in combination with other drugs. To see if they can do better, and other drugs will continue to be tested. Maybe in different combinations, they get the improvements to 20% or something more meaningful. So basically, it's just a baseline, a really low baseline. But something is better than nothing... again, with the caveat that the side effects don't outweigh the benefits.

 

Again, I don't know the details about the trial, but I assume the comparison is all-cause mortality at certain number of days from diagnosis or hospital admission. As for other people's question re: maybe it doesn't show benefit in the sickest patient, that doesn't really matter. As long as we know which population it works for, then physicians will be looking for that population and starting the drug on them. It's actually not uncommon at all to exclude the sickest patients in such trials.

One of the criticisms I've heard of the Chinese study was that they allowed patients to enroll up to 12 days after onset of symptoms, and that may have been too late for any medicine to show a benefit. That study is also not available to the general public yet, so I can't comment on the details, but it'll be interesting to compare the patient populations and hopefully glean some useful data at a later date.

 

Just in case anyone was still calling it the flu

Just passed 61,000 deaths(in less than 60 days), so that puts it higher than the worst estimate of any recent flu season.
United States Coronavirus: 1,055,303 Cases and 61,112 Deaths - Worldometer

 

I’m not calling it the flu but think a better comparison would be if we had a covid vaccine.

 

No, you called people who wanted to go slow "hiding" and "team afraid." I said that is just as dumb as calling people who want to open things up "team murder" or "irresponsible." The point, which you apparently missed, was that intelligent moderation, not calling people "team afraid" or "irresponsible", was the path to success (along with testing, tracking, and cooperation - where the current federal failures lie).

News flash, there is only one pandemic that threatens exponential growth in deaths if not addressed. This is the kind of childishness that illustrates where an attempt to converse is a waste of time. But thanks for telling all of us that nobody died before this virus was around. Brilliant and meaningful....

 

4:55. Is anybody that's telling us to stay 6 feet apart and wear masks doing it themselves? What would Publix think of this behavior?

 

And they're all getting haircuts and makeup plastered on 20 times a day. Good for thee but not for me.

 

The official counts likely underreport covid19 deaths.

U.S. Coronavirus Death Toll Is Far Higher Than Reported, C.D.C. Data Suggests

 

FAKE NEWS!!!!!