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Covid-19’s stop-gap solution until vaccines and antivirals are ready

globalhealthnow.org

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Re: Covid-19’s stop-gap solution until vaccines and antivirals are ready

#81

Post by TeMPOraL »

samsonradu wrote: post #76

My knowledge about industrial manufacturing is slim to none so can someone explain please why is it not possible to (globally) ramp up production of face masks and ventilators to a virtually unlimited quantity? What exactly is the bottleneck? Are we lacking materials, labour or the technical know-how? Are the factories currently producing them so advanced and hard to reproduce?

You need time to switch machines and people to different production. The best-suited plants are all in Asia. Supply chain is thoroughly shot and in state of chaos at this point. That said, a lot of efforts are underway simultaneously, so I expect massive-scale production will start very soon.

Re: Covid-19’s stop-gap solution until vaccines and antivirals are ready

#82

Post by kevingadd »

selimthegrim wrote: post #70
IAmEveryone wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Taiwan is authoritarian ultra capitalist?

Taiwan was super authoritarian in recent memory [1], so it's understandable that someone would think it's still true (of course, it's not). Maybe the confusion is because some of their disease mitigation strategies were authoritarian, but that's pretty common in war/disaster scenarios. Every country turns authoritarian when they need people to shelter in place or need to force factories to retool to build war equipment or medical essentials.

[1] In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the ROC transitioned from a one-party military dictatorship to a multi-party democracy with a semi-presidential system.

Re: Covid-19’s stop-gap solution until vaccines and antivirals are ready

#83

Post by samsonradu »

raverbashing wrote: post #79
samsonradu wrote: post #76

My knowledge about industrial manufacturing is slim to none so can someone explain please why is it not possible to (globally) ramp up production of face masks and ventilators to a virtually unlimited quantity? What exactly is the bottleneck? Are we lacking materials, labour or the technical know-how? Are the factories currently producing them so advanced and hard to reproduce?

I think you can ramp production of those but it will still require people to work them and the most severe cases are still fatal even with the ventilators.

Well, there is no silver bullet here is it? If we're to solve this we'll probably need to tackle it from all sides - isolation, vaccine and treatment.

Re: Covid-19’s stop-gap solution until vaccines and antivirals are ready

#84

Post by funcDropShadow »

ltbarcly3 wrote: post #47

Why do they keep saying 'until vaccines are ready' as though it's a foregone conclusion that we can make a vaccine for this? Is this type of virus always a good one to make vaccines for? There are tons of viruses we have failed to vaccinate for, despite trying for 30 or 40 years. People seem to be universally saying a vaccine is '12-18 months away'. Is this just misinformation? I would love to hear from an expert abo…

Because, there are multiple teams of companies and scientists around the globe, that all report that they'll have candidates ready in the very near future, i.e. 3-4 weeks. Which means they are convinced the vaccines work. But since vaccines are given to a large number of people, you have to make sure that there is a very low number of adverse effects. And that takes most of the time. But the vaccine candidates are almost ready.

Re: Covid-19’s stop-gap solution until vaccines and antivirals are ready

#85

Post by TeMPOraL »

baxtr wrote: post #59
ArnoVW wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While this is true, I wonder if this is not partly because the European countries were quite busy organising themselves and were anticipating an urgent but unknown need for their own population. China has a retrospective of three months and has stabilized the situation. They know what they are facing and the resources needed, and have even started to dismantle the temporary hospitals they set up in January. What can…

You are probably right. I think they could have sent at least doctors and nurses to prepare for their own epidemic.

I remember reading that some countries did. That said, there are shortages of doctors everywhere in the EU, and no country in their right mind would send out staff and supplies knowing they'll need them all back in two weeks.

Re: Covid-19’s stop-gap solution until vaccines and antivirals are ready

#86

Post by tyingq »

"Yes. In fact, the Chinese sent 90 tons of plasma to Italy."

That's impressive. I wonder how many individual donations that maps to. And how many people that could treat.

Edit: Trying to answer my own question. Typical blood donation is 470ml. That weighs about 0.5 kilograms. Plasma is roughly half of what's in your blood, so half that again... 0.25 kilograms. So assuming they meant metric ton (1000Kg), 4000 individual donations per ton. 90 tons is then 360,000 donations. Did I miss some math? That's, um...wow. Maybe the 90 tons includes bags, boxes, pallets, etc?

No idea how many that treats though.

Re: Covid-19’s stop-gap solution until vaccines and antivirals are ready

#87

Post by TeMPOraL »

kevingadd wrote: post #78
_bxg1 wrote: post #41

This crisis is the first event in my lifetime that's given me any optimism about our ability, as a global civilization, to solve problems and get things done. I don't feel like we've seen humanity at its best in several decades. Shame it always takes a catastrophe (and an immediate one at that; see climate change) to bring it out.

This crisis has mostly been a massive demonstration of how capitalism undermines society's ability to prevent and cope with disasters. We're seeing individual people show their best while profit motive leads to people sabotaging others' hope of success. A few examples: * A particular politician prioritizing low numbers (to look good) over actual infection reduction * A particular government not issuing orders for nee…

It will be also a big blow for individual freedoms worldwide.

When those of us who survive will look back at it, they won't be able to ignore the fact that sending police to beat up people at a few mass gathering on beaches and streets, and then putting military out to enforce quarantine measures, would result in exponentially less loss of life and damage to the economy.

Re: Covid-19’s stop-gap solution until vaccines and antivirals are ready

#88

Post by gingerlime »

funcDropShadow wrote: post #77
nikofeyn wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This crisis is the first event in my lifetime that's given me any optimism about our ability, as a global civilization, to solve problems and get things done. would you mind elaborating? because i find it extremely difficult how one could hold such an optimistic and apparent naive opinion. from where i sit, this crisis is showing the exact opposite. there is very little international communication and cooperation,…

If you are focused on the U.S., then I understand your sentiment. But if you look beyond, it is really promising. Medical science and biology are producing new scientific knowledge about CoViD-19 and SARS-Cov2 at break neck speed. That alone is amazing to see. On the other hand, you really see that people get it and that they have to do social distancing to help them and everybody else. On top of that you see, e.g. C…

I know it’s OT but would love to understand more about the health insurance situation in Germany and what’s happened in the last 20 years. Ideally in English which is a big ask I guess.

Moved to Germany in 2011 and still can’t work out the whole insurance thing (and don’t understand German enough to read and figure those nuances)

Re: Covid-19’s stop-gap solution until vaccines and antivirals are ready

#89

Post by lotsofpulp »

fulafel wrote: post #80
samsonradu wrote: post #76

My knowledge about industrial manufacturing is slim to none so can someone explain please why is it not possible to (globally) ramp up production of face masks and ventilators to a virtually unlimited quantity? What exactly is the bottleneck? Are we lacking materials, labour or the technical know-how? Are the factories currently producing them so advanced and hard to reproduce?

Same as many other problems (eg global warming) - the market economy can't deliver a solution because it's not short teem profitable for the relevant actors.

It could be priced to be short term profitable, but then the sellers would get accused of price gouging.

Re: Covid-19’s stop-gap solution until vaccines and antivirals are ready

#90

Post by acqq »

jlokier wrote: post #62
acqq wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cost comes from the nonscalability of both the production and the use.

What are the main obstacles to scalability of production and of use? Could the former be amenable to treatment as an engineering problem? There are a lot of motivated engineering minds right now.

I'm not a professional in that area, just based on what I've read, so in case of doubt, check better sources:

If you use human donors, you need trained doctors spending time and equipment to select the donors, handle the donors, take care of them during the donation which takes hours (the needle is stuck in their vein during that time), trained professionals using expensive equipment to process the donation, and then trained doctors to perform the infusion on the patient, an hour or two, but you still want keep the patient in the hospital overnight in case of complications, which do happen often enough that it was practice to do so: as in, once in thousand. At the end all that work, it is relatively sure that the described work could result in protection of exactly one patient more than before you started. The percentage of known complications and the potential for failure in every step is what makes it non scalable.

With non human donors you can avoid some work, but the second part remains: it's not "just a shot" like when you do a vaccination which is scalable.

And while vaccination is scalable, if you're going to vaccinate billions, you also want to be very sure you aren't harming them, that's why speeding up vaccine production is not scalable. Even producing the vaccines is not easy at all to scale.

It's not that nobody has attempted hard to achieve this up to now.

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