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Get Real: no drug or vaccine will avoid a very big coronavirus epidemic

blogs.sciencemag.org

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Re: Get Real: no drug or vaccine will avoid a very big coronavirus epidemic

#171

Post by Madmallard »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #29

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 statements about the FDA are way off mark. There's plenty of very dangerous drugs in use now riddled with misinformation around their safety. Fluoroquinolones and statins are some of the worst offenders with terrible irreversible cumulative side effects and the fda barely has done anything for them. Many in the know believe they're conplicit on the matter since those drugs go out to basically everyone now at some point.

Re: Get Real: no drug or vaccine will avoid a very big coronavirus epidemic

#172

Post by lm28469 »

haunter wrote: post #162

So some comments here say 60-70% global infection [0] and 3-4% death rate [1]. Is this really possible? That would be like ~150 million deaths. 0, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22485485 1, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22485692

"if" we get to 70% of the world contaminated and "if" the death rate really is that high globally then yes the maths checks out. But that's already a lot of "ifs".

Re: Get Real: no drug or vaccine will avoid a very big coronavirus epidemic

#173

Post by pkaye »

dekhn wrote: post #112
pkaye wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow looks like there are still people around who suffered deformities because of the mistakes in approving thalidomide. https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-15536544

It's also still used successfully as a medicine for a number of uses.

I sure they take more precautions like make sure women who take the medications are not pregnant.

Re: Get Real: no drug or vaccine will avoid a very big coronavirus epidemic

#174

Post by dgacmu »

anu7df wrote: post #154

Yes. It is worse than a regular flu. But, if you look at statistics from S. Korea, the only country with a substantial infection and trust worthy numbers (as in they test heavily), the death rate is around 0.6% overall. So not the end of the world, but nothing to be complacent about either. If the White house will get out of the way and let the system work, we may still have time to mitigate the worst here in the USA…

You're making a somewhat dangerous mistake in your analysis. South Korea's death rate is not well established yet: 7% of their cases were new just in the last day, and they've had very few people with confirmed recovery yet. There are likely to be more deaths to come.

Re: Get Real: no drug or vaccine will avoid a very big coronavirus epidemic

#175

Post by Nasrudith »

mhb wrote: post #93
blobbers wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

`...would rather lose a lot of good drugs than approve a bad drug.` Thanks for saying this, and rightfully so! Approving a bad drug in the world where distribution channels are very well set up could have disastrous effects. We can point to things like the opioid crisis in the USA right now - a drug that is so addictive it should have never been put into use the way it was.

I don't understand the "rightfully so!" There is a real cost to not approving good drugs in order to avoid approving bad ones.

It is a matter of diminishing returns already somewhat accounted for in the approval process. Cancer drugs are under far more lax standards given the alternative is death by cancer as even an ironically carcinogenic cancer treatment which gives it again later is preferred to dying of it now.

As opposed to a slightly better allergy pill which more caution may be afforded. Not perfect by any means but it isn't totally blind.

Re: Get Real: no drug or vaccine will avoid a very big coronavirus epidemic

#176

Post by wooly_bully »

pier25 wrote: post #165
anu7df wrote: post #154

Yes. It is worse than a regular flu. But, if you look at statistics from S. Korea, the only country with a substantial infection and trust worthy numbers (as in they test heavily), the death rate is around 0.6% overall. So not the end of the world, but nothing to be complacent about either. If the White house will get out of the way and let the system work, we may still have time to mitigate the worst here in the USA…

You don't trust Italy with their numbers? Last time I checked it was around 3% there. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/03/coronavirus-deaths-ch...

In the linked figure in the article, the SK tests have about 5x more per million people so their denominator is likely a better idea of the true number of cases.

Re: Get Real: no drug or vaccine will avoid a very big coronavirus epidemic

#177

Post by mhb »

rjkennedy98 wrote: post #156
mhb wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand the "rightfully so!" There is a real cost to not approving good drugs in order to avoid approving bad ones.

> There is a real cost to not approving good drugs in order to avoid approving bad ones. Do you have any evidence for this? Seems to me like a classic shibboleth of the pharma guild.

Not sure what sort of evidence you're looking for. There are certainly approved life-saving and other valuable drugs. If they had been approved sooner they would have had a greater benefit. There is an institutional bias towards avoiding costs due to approving a bad drug versus delaying approval and incurring unseen costs.

Re: Get Real: no drug or vaccine will avoid a very big coronavirus epidemic

#178

Post by hackeer »

jennyyang wrote: post #130
the_af wrote: post #74

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…

A single individual getting coronavirus isn't a big deal. Chances are they will be fine. 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 ge…

where are you getting the info to say only 15-20% percent of the cases show symptoms?

Re: Get Real: no drug or vaccine will avoid a very big coronavirus epidemic

#179

Post by buckminster »

jokoon wrote: post #135
gdsimoes wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Harming the economy is also a risk to people’s lives, though.

To what extent? Please expand because this depends on how people's lives depends on the economy. You can take good measures that slows down the economy without endangering people's lives. Of course you can also consider social unrest to be a risk but that's another matter.

If people's lives don't depend on the economy, why don't we all stop working?

Re: Get Real: no drug or vaccine will avoid a very big coronavirus epidemic

#180

Post by bcrosby95 »

haunter wrote: post #162

So some comments here say 60-70% global infection [0] and 3-4% death rate [1]. Is this really possible? That would be like ~150 million deaths. 0, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22485485 1, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22485692

Outcome of critical cases is heavily reliant upon whether the medical system can handle the number of infected. If someone requires a ventilator and you're out of ventilators they're kinda fucked. There's also evidence that lots of people show little to no symptoms. There's probably a large number of people that simply don't know they had it. Which is both good and bad.

If we manage to keep it from spreading too far too fast, from the variety of studies I've seen then anywhere from .5% to 1% is probably more realistic. But if we don't, expect something higher. This is why waiting for "enough" people to die as evidence of severity, then responding is a poor response.

FWIW the Spanish Flu infected 27% of the world's population. 60-70% seems really high.

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