At what point did you / will you take the coronavirus epidemic seriously?

[myboynoah]

"What have you got to lose?"



https://www.military.com/daily-news/...rus-study.html

Fox News hosts go mum on the covid-19 drug they spent weeks promoting

Echoing President Trump’s description of the drug as a “game changer,” Carlson, Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity, Lou Dobbs and “Fox and Friends” hosts spoke of its potential benefits in dozens of segments from mid-March to mid-April. They also criticized those in the media and the medical establishment who raised concerns, turning a debate among researchers and scientists into another front in the culture wars.

But in the past week or so, Trump has all but stopped talking about hydroxychloroquine. And so have Fox News’s hosts.

The relative silence follows disappointing, even alarming, new research about hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for covid-19, the disease caused by the virus. A study released this week on 368 male Veterans Affairs patients with the disease showed that the death rate among those given the drug, both in combination with another drug and alone, was higher than for those who were not. Researchers also said its use made no difference in the need for ventilators.

[myboynoah]

Here's the other big unknown. Does exposure to the virus confer immunity? Can you be reinfected? If so, then using antibody testing to make potential employment and quarantining decisions suffers a big blow. And that would have serious implications for a vaccine. I'm hearing whispers that some researchers are not too sanguine about a vaccine, given the immunological data of other coronaviruses.

I don't know the specific path forward. It will take time and a better serologic test. I'm beating this drum because we still don't have one, and the nation as a whole might be moving forward before we really have a good handle on the prevalence. In my neck of the woods, the county health director is pressuring the hospital to begin antibody testing yesterday. I do not think we have enough standardized data to trust one test over the other, or to trust any of them. I'm trying to fend this off until something with better performance comes along.

Yeah, i think I read that there are roughly 90 tests on the market and that only four have been approved by FDA.

[myboynoah]

Hmm...

http://www.uoflnews.com/section/scie...l-coronavirus/

Wasn't it something like this that ushered in the zombie apocolypse?

[UVACoug]

More than 50% of the states (including Utah) are now paying unemployment benefits that exceed 100% of average pre-unemployment wages:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/...e=articleShare

Why would anyone go back to work when they can make more money sitting on their couches and collecting unemployment?

[BigPiney]

More than 50% of the states (including Utah) are now paying unemployment benefits that exceed 100% of average pre-unemployment wages:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/...e=articleShare

Why would anyone go back to work when they can make more money sitting on their couches and collecting unemployment?

My wife works as a school librarian, and doesn't get paid very much. I was hoping they would lay her off because unemployment is way more than she was making. Instead they have kept her on and have paid her despite the fact that she hasn't been there for 6 weeks.

[Uncle Ted]

Well that was quick:

https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/04/21/840341224/nih-panel-recommends-against-drug-combination-trump-has-promoted-for-covid-19

Many of us were skeptical from the beginning. That doesn't mean we weren't hopeful for potential efficacy. Just in case any of you judge my rabid anti-Trump bias is clouding my opinion here.

And you are not skeptical about this study? This one seems to be full of the same flaws you were griping about before:

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1....16.20065920v1

See the long list of comments down at the bottom.

Some highlights:

- The most severe cases disproportionately received the drug

hydroxychloroquine, with or without azithromycin, was more likely to be prescribed to patients with more severe disease.

- It was a small, non-peer-reviewed study, not a clinical trial. Others reporting are even pointing this out:

not considered large enough to rule out other factors that could have affected survival.

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/0...s-study-198590

- The patients in this study don't represent the entire population. Here is an obvious problem: the patients were all male! WTF? Are only men getting infected?

How can you overlook these obvious flaws?

[Omaha 680]

This is sad.

In New York’s largest hospital system, 88 percent of coronavirus patients on ventilators didn’t make it



This is why testing is not a sideshow. Liberal testing and contact tracing is needed for a number of reasons. In this case, it will allow those infected to be monitored and treated before they reach "a severe enough course to require hospitalization through the emergency department."

Korea is the best in the world at this.

How many tests per day in the United States is enough to do it the Korean way?

[originalsocal]

More than 50% of the states (including Utah) are now paying unemployment benefits that exceed 100% of average pre-unemployment wages:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/...e=articleShare

Why would anyone go back to work when they can make more money sitting on their couches and collecting unemployment?

This says more about how poorly people in 50% of the states are paid than it does about unemployment.

Let me guess, you've never been on unemployment and you've never worked a near minimum wage job as an adult.

[UVACoug]

Let me guess, you've never been on unemployment and you've never worked a near minimum wage job as an adult.

A non-sequitur. How will paying people more not to work than they would make working raise wages for minimum wage workers? Was that the goal of the unemployment bonus included in the CARE Act?

[Eddie]

She may be a nutjob, but not because she wants business to resume. Also, she has not been advocating for casinos to "completely open up" assuming that means to operate as they did before. There is a 27 page proposal from MGM which has been adopted by pretty much all casino owners. It lays out how casinos are going to operate as we come out of the COVID lockdown, and it is far from "completely open[ing] up". It is the model being applied in Macao and which would be applied here in Las Vegas. Why didn't Anderson Cooper have questions on that? But all of the virtue signalers out there are going to jump on some sound bytes and the words Anderson Cooper put in her mouth and claim she and anyone who wants to take measures to open things back up are nutjobs.

I'm no fan of Mayor Goodman. But she is advocating for a responsible reopening, and there is nothing crazy about that. We have flattened the curve. The measures being implemented have helped, and there is a smart way to implement those same measures across most all industries while operating their businesses. As I have said many times on here already, there is a lot of room between shelter in place and completely reopen.

She just did a horrible job of communicating things.

There is a lot of room between shelter in place and things being wide open.

What responsibility does the government have to assure that when things do open up, they are done safely? She seems to be taking the stance that the government has no responsibility at all - which, if you lean hard right as a capitalist who supports the idea of survival of the fittest, could make sense and be argued.

On the other hand - does the government have some responsibility in a pandemic scenario to take an approach more along the lines of "we want you to be able to do business, it needs to be done safely - show us your plan and how you can pull it off, and we'll give you our blessing to run with it." Or, along the lines of health code - maybe not ask to see the plan but simply identify requirements that must be part of a businesses plan for that business to open safely.

If you're going on Anderson Cooper, I just don't think it sells well to essentially throw your arms in the air and say "not my problem! I have no idea in the world how they'll be able to do it" with a smile. It wouldn't be hard to say that the casinos have shared that they have a plan and believe it can be done safely, and that he'll need to chat with them about the particulars.

[Northwestcoug]

And you are not skeptical about this study? This one seems to be full of the same flaws you were griping about before:

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1....16.20065920v1

See the long list of comments down at the bottom.

Some highlights:

- The most severe cases disproportionately received the drug

- It was a small, non-peer-reviewed study, not a clinical trial. Others reporting are even pointing this out:

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/0...s-study-198590

- The patients in this study don't represent the entire population. Here is an obvious problem: the patients were all male! WTF? Are only men getting infected?

How can you overlook these obvious flaws?

I do appreciate the deep dive into the methods Ted!

Sure those are flaws. They need to be addressed in larger studies. But this data is more solid than anything we've seen yet. You call it a 'small' trial, but it is the biggest so far. Can you point to a single study of more than a handful of patients that has shown a net benefit? Not just lack of harm, but benefit? I'm serious; if there is one, I want to know.

It shouldn't be lost on anyone that after a couple of months of trying the drugs on COVID patients, we are not seeing anything approaching the hype that it first generated. That should tell you something. The NIH panel has seen enough; they recommend not using it.

[Northwestcoug]

This is potentially good news. Of ~300 studied outbreaks in China, only 2 of them occurred in an outdoor setting. The rest were indoors or in a transit system.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1....04.20053058v1

I wouldn't mind eating or meeting more in an outdoor setting.

[Donuthole]

She just did a horrible job of communicating things.

There is a lot of room between shelter in place and things being wide open.

What responsibility does the government have to assure that when things do open up, they are done safely? She seems to be taking the stance that the government has no responsibility at all - which, if you lean hard right as a capitalist who supports the idea of survival of the fittest, could make sense and be argued.

On the other hand - does the government have some responsibility in a pandemic scenario to take an approach more along the lines of "we want you to be able to do business, it needs to be done safely - show us your plan and how you can pull it off, and we'll give you our blessing to run with it." Or, along the lines of health code - maybe not ask to see the plan but simply identify requirements that must be part of a businesses plan for that business to open safely.

If you're going on Anderson Cooper, I just don't think it sells well to essentially throw your arms in the air and say "not my problem! I have no idea in the world how they'll be able to do it" with a smile. It wouldn't be hard to say that the casinos have shared that they have a plan and believe it can be done safely, and that he'll need to chat with them about the particulars.

She was ill-prepared, no doubt. I'm guessing she didn't prepare much at all, which was a huge mistake. She had to have known that the reason CNN wanted her on was to make her look like an idiot Trumper.

But she's correct that it's not the government's job to come up with a plan setting forth the way these places will operate. These are huge, multi-billion dollar operations--they will (and have) come up with those ideas and propose them, and the enforcing agencies (not the mayor, btw--all of these casinos answer to a gaming commission and other regulatory agencies) will alter, adjust, approve as they see fit. Also, she's not wrong that Anderson Cooper is an alarmist. Still she should have been prepared to discuss the ways in which gambling can be carried out in a socially-distancing responsible way. Because it can, and it will. So yeah, she was inarticulate, at best, and she's paying the price of public shaming. This was probably her last term as Mayor anyway.

[Omaha 680]

Even though the infection rates being reported are much higher than the official tally, they are not nearly high enough to not be concerned about a second wave as we open up again. Nearly every government is worried about this...except Sweden?

https://www.ft.com/content/79eaad5d-...c-adf1fd8e8868

Their state epidemiologists estimate 1/3 of Stockholm will have been infected by May 1. One even used the naughty phrase "herd immunity" by mid may. Seems overly optimistic but if they pull that off with only voluntary social distancing and keeping restaurants and schools open, many areas should be rethinking their strategies. Obviously this wouldn't have worked in the hardest hit regions like New York and Northern Italy.

NY haven't release their results yet but Cuomo said a 3,000 person sample at grocery stores across NY state showed 14% have the antibodies. It will be interesting to see what the number is with a more representative sample and increased sample size. I'm very curious about NYC specific data, which should be even higher than the statewide %.

I know Sweden pulled their report about expected infection rates in Stockholm and will be revising with an explanation of the "error".

[SeattleUte]

NY haven't release their results yet but Cuomo said a 3,000 person sample at grocery stores across NY state showed 14% have the antibodies. It will be interesting to see what the number is with a more representative sample and increased sample size. I'm very curious about NYC specific data, which should be even higher than the statewide %.

I know Sweden pulled their report about expected infection rates in Stockholm and will be revising with an explanation of the "error".

Apparently New York, Las Vegas, the NBA, the NCAA, and all religions will have to cease to exist.