121–130 of 262 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree, but the death rate of COVID-19 may not be high enough to justify a huge increase in risk tolerance.
Dearh rate for sever cases is huge. We'll get the first test results at end of march/start of april. If I have 30% chance of dying I take anything that lowers the chance significantly.
I see a lot of panicky comments, both in real life and in this very thread. I know COVID19 is different from a regular flu, but is it more serious? "Regular" flu is very contagious and kills lots of people every year. It's ok to study coronavirus and to try to find ways to effectively manage it, combat it or prevent the disease -- but why are we panicking? Nobody panics about the flu and it's proven to be fatal for a…
I know Derek Lowe is an expert. However, sometimes, experts think that because things have always been a certain way throughout their career, they will always be like that. Drug development has been very conservative especially in the US for the past several decades. The FDA is all about making sure they never have a thalidomide incident and would rather lose a lot of good drugs than approve a bad drug. This is the s…
Your are making the same bad assumption that our President is making.
Let me clue you in,
Any idea how ,many test kits we need for 400 million?
400 million for one time use but there will be more than one time use...ie more than 400 million.
any idea how much money it takes to get just 40 million test kits out to Americans for free?
One Billion dollars...
Now here comes the logistics bite in the ass.. how many trained US Health Public Service workers do we have skilled in showing how to use such test kits?
Oh damn Trump cut CDC funding and public health funding...
It snot rocket science if you cut public health funding than you cut the very fabric of the future response to such an epidemic in the first place..ie cannot spend even the demo price of 7 billion to immediate fix no immediate fix is there its been cut already!
Rant mode off
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Drug development has been very conservative especially in the US for the past several decades That is actually not what I hear from people who know this stuff. In fact many are very concerned that the FDA is far too quick with drug approval based on weak outcomes. (Big recommendation: Follow Vinay Prasad on twitter, he's spot on on these issues.) > During WWII design and production ramped up to an unprecedented deg…
> very concerned that the FDA is far too quick with drug approval based on weak outcomes The current FDA requires strong evidence of safety, over a long period. Prasad etc are arguing the FDA should be stricter on efficacy. In a pandemic, it makes sense to lower your standards for safety to get new treatments out sooner.
People in pharma and in authority (FDA and other organizations) are intimately familiar with the need to strike the right balance and have a lot more considerations than you seem to assume they do.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The death rate of COVID-19 is at about 3.4% on average. In comparison, the death rate of seasonal flu is about 0.1% in the US. No, it is not "like" the flu. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/03/who-says-coronavirus-death-r...
3.4% of reported cases have died. That doesn’t mean the actual IFR is 3.4%. Data modeling suggests it’s closer to 0.98%. It’s also important to note that age plays a significant factor. The IFR is about 0.2% for young healthy people, while it is quite dangerous for people over 60 with existing conditions. https://institutefordiseasemodeling.github.io/nCoV-public/an...
> evidence to date points toward 2019-nCoV having the potential to have comparable severity to the 1918 flu pandemic in the absence of effective control and treatment, when averaged across all ages.
Early detection and isolation is key. Much of the world seems to be doing a poor job of it, and that is what is causing people to be concerned.
I see a lot of panicky comments, both in real life and in this very thread. I know COVID19 is different from a regular flu, but is it more serious? "Regular" flu is very contagious and kills lots of people every year. It's ok to study coronavirus and to try to find ways to effectively manage it, combat it or prevent the disease -- but why are we panicking? Nobody panics about the flu and it's proven to be fatal for a…
Given that this is so similar to the previous SARS epidemic, how did that whole thing eventually end? Was a vaccine created? Did it just naturally fizzle out?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You may be correct about the death rate, but the disruption that it's causing the global economy may change the calculus in the FDA.
We should risk people's lives because doing otherwise may harm the economy..?
The key may not be a vaccine but simply staying alive. Covid-19 kills with a "cytokine storm": cytochine release syndrome(cytokine storm): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cytokine_release_syndrome Article discussing coronavirus et al and cytochine storm: "Clinical features of patients infected with 2019 novel coronavirus in Wuhan, China" https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6... From the article:…
SARS-CoV-19 on the other hand seems to cause mortality more often in patients 55+ years of age rather than the relatively young. At least from the data so far. The NIH emphasized this in yesterday's WH/NIH presser.
I see a lot of panicky comments, both in real life and in this very thread. I know COVID19 is different from a regular flu, but is it more serious? "Regular" flu is very contagious and kills lots of people every year. It's ok to study coronavirus and to try to find ways to effectively manage it, combat it or prevent the disease -- but why are we panicking? Nobody panics about the flu and it's proven to be fatal for a…
The problem is that it's very infectious, R0 could be 6+ where the flu is about 1-2. That means it's 3-6 times more contagious than the flu, so it spreads very very quickly.
At the same time, it causes severe symptoms in 15-20% of cases. When these people have access to medical care, they will likely survive. But if they don't get access to timely health care, they might die, which is what happened in China.
The problem with both the above is that you will get many, many people infected all at the same time, and you might get a few hundred people with severe symptoms in a small city. That's enough to overrun several hospitals all at the same time. The US has about 2.5 hospital beds for 10,000 citizens, which is 31st in the world. Japan and Korea have over 12 per 10,000 citizens. the top 2 in the world. And the patients that get severe need ventilators which are even less than this.
Once the hospital beds are filled, people start dying, which causes panic. Then economies will start to suffer because no one will eat at restaurants, people will panic at Costco like we've seen, businesses will go out of business.
People forget that this is simple math. Coronavirus will spread very quickly in the US and across the world. And many people will die and all hospitals will get overrun. What we need is at-home treatment and to somehow get people to avoid getting severe symptoms. If warm summer weather decreases the R0, then we might be able to avoid it, but some parts of the Northern Hemisphere are still in winter and won't be warm for at least 2 months.