COVID-19 Thread

[sveumrules]

So if I'm following this all correctly (very possible I'm not), 70 million in taxpayer funds were used to develop a treatment of questionable efficacy which the US goverment subsequently ordered almost the entire supply of to sell back to infected taxpayers at 3,200 a pop...and it might even kind of work.

No, you're not following this correctly. Remdesivir was developed more than a decade ago as a Hepatitis-C treatment (didn't work well), and then studied as an Ebola treatment.

 

It takes years to develop a drug, so they are testing available drugs already on the market that have anti-viral or anti-inflammatory effects with the potential to counteract some of the known or hypothesized pathways of the disease.

 

As a FYI, the "cost" (before rebates, discounts, etc.) of an average Hepatitis-C drug is over $50K for about 8-12 weeks of treatment.

 

Peter Maybarduk, a lawyer at the consumer group Public Citizen, called the price “an outrage.”

 

“This is a drug that received at least $70 million in public funding” toward its development, he said. “Remdesivir should be in the public domain.”

 

“The price puts to rest any notion that drug companies will ‘do the right thing’ because it is a pandemic,” Dr. Peter Bach, a health policy expert at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York said in an email. “The price might have been fine if the company had demonstrated that the treatment saved lives. It didn’t.”

[igor67]

Assuming nothing else questionable happening before hand it is worth pointing out that there is generally very little difference in the quality of evidence for a study whose results 'were almost statistically significant' vs. one that was just barely statistically significant. In this case knowing what the disease is and how the drug works, with just one study to go on the results lean very much toward it helps with mortality. But that's a lot like playing poker when your hand is a 2-1 favorite. You will be right a lot, but you'll also wrack up a lot of mistakes, so better proof is ideal. In any event when they first announced Remdesivir results the clearer finding was that it shortened hospital recovery time by 4 days. If you compare 4 days in the hospital to the drug cost I'm guessing it is pretty easy to come out ahead. Which shouldn't be taken to mean I agree with the price exactly, but Gilead did invest a lot of their money as well, but to my knowledge never really made any of it back because the drug ended up not performing super well for Hep-C. It is potentially a good example of how divergent the public vs. private interests are for drugs. Publicly cures are what we all want. Private companies though love treatments, the longer and more chronic the better.

[xisxisxis]

"Experts" to me is just a general term encompassing medical scientists and doctors who specialize in infectious diseases, respected medical journals and peer reviewed studies. But I'm sure everyone has their own definitions, which I'd generally be flexible on as long as it doesn't include A) Politicians, or B) Your Facebook friends.

A colleague died a few years ago from lung cancer. I heard his spouse was upset at the medical advice they received near the end from a colorectal oncologist. I was astounded that they would listen to a colorectal oncologist instead of the lung oncologist. Why, they're both oncologists? Because it makes a difference (lung biology is different than colon and the cancers are different).

 

All of these "experts" really need to be ranked based on their "expertise". Obviously, an infectious disease expert is better than a pediatrist, but a microbiologist is not as good as a communicable disease specialist (both infectious disease). Using WAR as an example we would see comm disease (6 WAR), microb (2 WAR), pediatrist (0.1 WAR).

 

"Medical Scientists" actually aren't that common. A Medical Doctor is not a scientist. They have likely never been trained in any way on performing research/studies. Most medical training is learning pattern recognition and probability - symptom X, Y, Z = disease I (42%), Disease II (25%), Disease III (19%), etc. Some MDs do "research" which often is similar to the study at the Henry Ford where they look at hospital records and look for any "findings". If the MD has a PhD then, yes they went through training to understand the principles of research. Having worked for 30 years with MD, MD/PhD and PhDs, there is a clear ranking of the average person within each field and yes, MD is by far the lowest in aptitude for research. That doesn't mean that the top %centiles don't have some good researchers, but that the vast majority are not good (like asking a pediatrist about coronavirus).

 

"Infectious Disease Experts" are hard to find because for too many years there has been no emphasis in medicine on this specialty. Most IDEs work on HIV. In my department we only have 2 and both are senior citizens (not the AARP kind, but collecting Social Security kind). There is almost a generation of faculty without a single expert in Infectious Disease. Mostly because it isn't sexy and specialization in medicine/research is to go for the sexy and where the money is and the money has not been in Infectious disease research. It's a disappearing specialty and we are seeing the effects of that with the current state of "experts".

 

"respected medical journals and peer reviewed studies" is an important consideration. The number of journals that publish scientific papers is astounding. In infectious Disease there are over 300! They aren't the same and where a study is published should be part of how it is ranked for importance/significance. The study from Henry Ford was published in the 62nd ranked journal in that field. Sure, there are other journals that are HIV specialized that are ranked higher, or publish only review articles and the rankings from 40-60 are likely pretty subjective, but this paper was not published in a highly respected journal. Why? Likely a multitude of factors, but none of which lead to a positive spin on the paper. As a scientist we learn how to "present" our data/papers in such a way that we are challenging the reviewers to question the findings. It's not uncommon to state "we found no side effects from treatment" when you haven't measured for anything (worst case) or when your measurements don't really capture side effects accurately (common). It's true that you didn't find anything. The challenge for the reviewer is to make sure the authors stated clearly what and how they measure for side effects. You can also be vague in your criteria hoping the reviewers don't catch something. Is this dishonest? Some would say yes, but ultimately you include very clear language about the impact, etc. and if someone gets an impression that isn't stated that's not the authors responsibility. In many ways it's a game. The game is best played when the reviewers are smart enough to catch the unclear, unstated issues. I teach a class on review of scientific literature. Year after year the students biggest surprise is that papers they thought were good and had no problems were actually riddled with issues and that almost every peer-reviewed published paper has inherent issues that can invalidate some or all of the findings.

 

Peer-reviewing has it's own issues. Scientists are busy and have their own careers to develop. I'm not going to review a paper from a 62nd ranked journal. I'll review for the top journals in the field because it's a valuable use of my time and I can put that onto my CV and it is a positive. So the reviewers for the 62nd ranked journal are the ones that can't get the 40th ranked journal to give them the time of day and won't stoop to review the 100th ranked journal. So you can drive tanks through the holes in a review if the reviewers aren't good (that's true also of higher ranked journals, but much less likely to happen - i.e. the reviewers will catch the issues). The former cancer center director at my institution would spend half of their lab meetings going over how you present the data for maximum impact. I stopped attending because a few months in I didn't need another reminder on the best font, title for a graph/table, etc. But for some it's all about presentation - putting lipstick on a pig. What friends and I call form over substance. While it's important to present the data in the best possible way, you should still have a clear finding that you are just improving. I reviewed a paper from a colleague prior to submission and asked why did you subset the subjects at point X. That was the only place they could subset the data for their to be a significant finding! So if you move point X by 5%? no finding. Is X relevant biologically? Nope. The author should not be publishing in that case and when they try the reviewer needs to find the problems. Unfortunately, the quality of the reviewer mirrors the quality of the journal.

 

The other reason so many of these studies never amount to anything is that there are severe biases that have been introduced. I worked with a FUNDED MD who insisted on knowing the status of a sample prior to running tests. DING DING DING. Alarms should be going off because as Igor stated blinded (double blinded) samples are critical. So we gave them a bunch of samples with random assignment of status and guess what? Every sample we labeled as a case, came back looking like a case and every sample labeled as a control came back looking like a control based on the "scientific testing". When we reassigned based on known case/control there was nothing. When presented with the data, the MD fought that this was an incorrect approach and their approach was better. Why? because the testing is subjective and they needed a "hint" for them to believe certain events within the test are "real". Many assays/tests are still subjective and don't rely on a clear value or metric. Unfortunately bias happens all the time in clinical trials as the inclusion of individuals in a study, or the arm they are put into can be influenced by bias. Removing subjects can also have bias and can skew the findings (all studies should have clear criteria for removing someone that isn't a function of the outcome you are measuring). That's why it's so important to increase sizes as much as possible, but more importantly have it repeated by others because they hopefully don't have the same criteria/bias. So the Henry Ford study could very well be effected by a clear bias in selection of how to put patients on each arm of the study, how to remove patients, when the endpoint is measured (yes, people will move the goalposts) that is driving the results. One study means nothing. And one principal investigator who believes a certain treatment is better than another can subconsciously (or even consciously - i.e. fraud) effect the outcome.

 

There's a lot that goes into how you should rank what is an expert. Most scientists are experts in a very narrow area and while they may have some knowledge of the general field, their knowledge of another very narrow area is not as good as those working in that area. Nobel Laureate? Nope, I've met some that are truly very bright people and others that are bumbling idiots (except in one very tiny specific area where they are THE expert). Titles are no guarantee. WAR might be a good example of the need for a metric that combines lots of different components into a measure of what is an "expert".

[LouisEly]

So if I'm following this all correctly (very possible I'm not), 70 million in taxpayer funds were used to develop a treatment of questionable efficacy which the US goverment subsequently ordered almost the entire supply of to sell back to infected taxpayers at 3,200 a pop...and it might even kind of work.

No, you're not following this correctly. Remdesivir was developed more than a decade ago as a Hepatitis-C treatment (didn't work well), and then studied as an Ebola treatment.

 

It takes years to develop a drug, so they are testing available drugs already on the market that have anti-viral or anti-inflammatory effects with the potential to counteract some of the known or hypothesized pathways of the disease.

 

As a FYI, the "cost" (before rebates, discounts, etc.) of an average Hepatitis-C drug is over $50K for about 8-12 weeks of treatment.

 

Peter Maybarduk, a lawyer at the consumer group Public Citizen, called the price “an outrage.”

 

“This is a drug that received at least $70 million in public funding” toward its development, he said. “Remdesivir should be in the public domain.”

 

“The price puts to rest any notion that drug companies will ‘do the right thing’ because it is a pandemic,” Dr. Peter Bach, a health policy expert at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York said in an email. “The price might have been fine if the company had demonstrated that the treatment saved lives. It didn’t.”

I have no idea where you are quoting that from, but it costs $500M to $1B to develop a drug and bring it to market. $72M is a drop in the bucket when it comes to drug development costs, probably about 10% of the total development cost, and they have discounted remdesivir well over 10% for $3200/treatment.

 

Now, if you're referring to funding a study, that's a different story, as you haven't provided a link to whatever you are quoting that from. But drug development is damn expensive, and remdesivir wasn't developed to treat COVID-19.

[sveumrules]

 

Peter Maybarduk, a lawyer at the consumer group Public Citizen, called the price “an outrage.”

 

“This is a drug that received at least $70 million in public funding” toward its development, he said. “Remdesivir should be in the public domain.”

 

“The price puts to rest any notion that drug companies will ‘do the right thing’ because it is a pandemic,” Dr. Peter Bach, a health policy expert at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York said in an email. “The price might have been fine if the company had demonstrated that the treatment saved lives. It didn’t.”

I have no idea where you are quoting that from, but it costs $500M to $1B to develop a drug and bring it to market. $72M is a drop in the bucket when it comes to drug development costs, probably about 10% of the total development cost, and they have discounted remdesivir well over 10% for $3200/treatment.

 

Now, if you're referring to funding a study, that's a different story, as you haven't provided a link to whatever you are quoting that from. But drug development is damn expensive, and remdesivir wasn't developed to treat COVID-19.

 

The italicized quote is from here...https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/remdesivir-coronavirus-gilead-charge-thousands-treatment-u-s-n1232385

 

Public Citizen's Remdesivir position is published on their website...https://www.citizen.org/news/gileads-remdesivir-price-is-offensive/

 

This StatNews article offers a range of "expert" opinions on what an appropriate price might possibly be...https://www.statnews.com/2020/05/15/gilead-remdesivir-pricing-coronavirus/

 

I figured Gilead was named after the totalitarian state in The Handmaid's Tale, but it turns out they actually drew their inspiration from the ancient Balm of Gilead.

 

This passage from Reverend Becca Stevens book Snake Oil: The Art of Healing and Truth-Telling seems somewhat relevant..."I believe it's more of an idea, like Eden, than a geographic location. Gilead represents the place that holds the hope of healing. For everyone who has been wounded, hurt, or abused, Gilead represents the sacred place where borders fade and balms are poured out lavishly."

 

The only thing lavish about Remdesivir seems to be the price point & Gilead is actively working to put up borders (https://www.citizen.org/news/remdesivir-should-be-in-the-public-domain-gileads-licensing-deal-picks-winners-and-losers/) so it appears they have a different interpretation of their namesake than does the Reverend.

[reillymcshane]

The MLB restart is going to be interesting because you'll have a very specific pool of people, and they'll know exactly how many of these people get COVID. Same with the NBA people. It's like having a ready-made experiment.

[reillymcshane]

Interesting thing bit of info I have gotten from my wife.

 

Her organization is find that many people are reluctant to get tested. Even if they find out they have been exposed to someone with COVID. There is not - in the eyes of some - many positives to getting tested.

 

A positive test means they can't go to work (devastating for some people), and it could affect their family going to work (ditto). It's not like there is a cure or something they can take to help with it. So why go through the hassle of the test?

 

Now, you can argue they should do the testing so - if positive - they can isolate and help keep it from spreading. But the big reason they don't want to do it is they are afraid of losing income.

 

Her org is also running into people who refuse to get tested due to believing COVID is all a hoax and stuff like that.

[DHonks]

 

Peter Maybarduk, a lawyer at the consumer group Public Citizen, called the price “an outrage.”

 

“This is a drug that received at least $70 million in public funding” toward its development, he said. “Remdesivir should be in the public domain.”

 

“The price puts to rest any notion that drug companies will ‘do the right thing’ because it is a pandemic,” Dr. Peter Bach, a health policy expert at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York said in an email. “The price might have been fine if the company had demonstrated that the treatment saved lives. It didn’t.”

I have no idea where you are quoting that from, but it costs $500M to $1B to develop a drug and bring it to market. $72M is a drop in the bucket when it comes to drug development costs, probably about 10% of the total development cost, and they have discounted remdesivir well over 10% for $3200/treatment.

 

Now, if you're referring to funding a study, that's a different story, as you haven't provided a link to whatever you are quoting that from. But drug development is damn expensive, and remdesivir wasn't developed to treat COVID-19.

 

The italicized quote is from here...https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/remdesivir-coronavirus-gilead-charge-thousands-treatment-u-s-n1232385

 

Public Citizen's Remdesivir position is published on their website...https://www.citizen.org/news/gileads-remdesivir-price-is-offensive/

 

This StatNews article offers a range of "expert" opinions on what an appropriate price might possibly be...https://www.statnews.com/2020/05/15/gilead-remdesivir-pricing-coronavirus/

 

I figured Gilead was named after the totalitarian state in The Handmaid's Tale, but it turns out they actually drew their inspiration from the ancient Balm of Gilead.

 

This passage from Reverend Becca Stevens book Snake Oil: The Art of Healing and Truth-Telling seems somewhat relevant..."I believe it's more of an idea, like Eden, than a geographic location. Gilead represents the place that holds the hope of healing. For everyone who has been wounded, hurt, or abused, Gilead represents the sacred place where borders fade and balms are poured out lavishly."

 

The only thing lavish about Remdesivir seems to be the price point & Gilead is actively working to put up borders (https://www.citizen.org/news/remdesivir-should-be-in-the-public-domain-gileads-licensing-deal-picks-winners-and-losers/) so it appears they have a different interpretation of their namesake than does the Reverend.

 

 

It actually costs over $2B to develop a drug now. It was over $1B back when I studied it in Econ classes on public policy in 2003. Part of the reason for the $2B+ number is that for each approved drug, you must account for the half dozen failed drugs. I wrote my senators in March to suggest they incentivize research by placing bounties on treatments. The rarer conditions often have little drug research as pharmaceutical companies target drugs where they can make their money back. My plan would be that regardless of rarity of condition, upon approval manufacturers would receive a check for 3-5 times the total development costs on the condition they set a gov’t mandated price. Additionally I would grant manufacturers 30 years of exclusive patent rights rather than 20 currently, as long as the prices continue to be fair. Basically I want private pharmaceutical companies to continue innovating. I want them to be profitable. I’d like to see long term consumer costs to go down once the drug is approved.

[LouisEly]

It actually costs over $2B to develop a drug now. It was over $1B back when I studied it in Econ classes on public policy in 2003. Part of the reason for the $2B+ number is that for each approved drug, you must account for the half dozen failed drugs. I wrote my senators in March to suggest they incentivize research by placing bounties on treatments. The rarer conditions often have little drug research as pharmaceutical companies target drugs where they can make their money back. My plan would be that regardless of rarity of condition, upon approval manufacturers would receive a check for 3-5 times the total development costs on the condition they set a gov’t mandated price. Additionally I would grant manufacturers 30 years of exclusive patent rights rather than 20 currently, as long as the prices continue to be fair. Basically I want private pharmaceutical companies to continue innovating. I want them to be profitable. I’d like to see long term consumer costs to go down once the drug is approved.

Oh yes, if you factor in the costs of the drugs that fail it's going to be closer to $2B, but I was referring to bringing that specific drug to market.

 

As for the "bounty" idea, that is somewhat already in place now. Several states have basically "bid out" treating their Hepatitis-C patient population to pharma companies - the states will pay a flat fee to the pharma company to treat their entire population of Hepatitis-C patients instead of the states being billed through medicaid on a per-patient basis. Because the new treatments have a 98% cure rate, there really aren't any recurring costs of chronic care.

[superfly]

So if I'm following this all correctly (very possible I'm not), 70 million in taxpayer funds were used to develop a treatment of questionable efficacy which the US goverment subsequently ordered almost the entire supply of to sell back to infected taxpayers at 3,200 a pop...and it might even kind of work.

No, you're not following this correctly. Remdesivir was developed more than a decade ago as a Hepatitis-C treatment (didn't work well), and then studied as an Ebola treatment.

 

It takes years to develop a drug, so they are testing available drugs already on the market that have anti-viral or anti-inflammatory effects with the potential to counteract some of the known or hypothesized pathways of the disease.

 

As a FYI, the "cost" (before rebates, discounts, etc.) of an average Hepatitis-C drug is over $50K for about 8-12 weeks of treatment.

 

Peter Maybarduk, a lawyer at the consumer group Public Citizen, called the price “an outrage.”

 

“This is a drug that received at least $70 million in public funding” toward its development, he said. “Remdesivir should be in the public domain.”

 

“The price puts to rest any notion that drug companies will ‘do the right thing’ because it is a pandemic,” Dr. Peter Bach, a health policy expert at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York said in an email. “The price might have been fine if the company had demonstrated that the treatment saved lives. It didn’t.”

 

I find that quite rich out of Dr. Bach considering Gilead basically gave away millions or billions of dollars in profit on Sovaldi to cure HcV.

 

I’m much more ready to criticize the government for being in the back pocket of big pharma for favoring these sketch drugs over hydroxychlorique and other cheaper drugs that pretty much do the same thing. Fauci in particular is in big pharmas pocket.

[PeaveyFury]

Fauci in particular is in big pharmas pocket.

 

I'm certain that most of us here are eager to see your supporting information on that point.

[DuWayne Steurer]

If you're going to post opinions stated as facts it seems like one would have links and information to back those sorts of things up. IMO of course.

[JosephC]

Looks like we should be seeing a big, big spike in the UK.

 

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8491821/English-drinkers-return-pubs-night-bar-closures.html

[tmwiese55]

Have seen the recent talking point is how deaths haven't spiked yet. I think I said a few pages back too which we're all hoping holds true for a number of reasons such as old people better protected now, earlier testing to catch cases, finding more mild cases, better treatment, etc. There is a lot of reasons this should not go up near the rates of before. But, with the hospitalizations going up in many places you'd think some increase comes soon. Hopefully it's not drastic though. If it is I'm sure everyone pushing that talking point now will quickly acknowledge.

 

but it did lead me down a hole trying to find EU comps on deaths per day now and I couldn't find it. As opposed to the New Cases graphs of EU vs USA that have been everywhere lately, so it was kind of frustrating and I thought odd so it made me curious if something was up trying to make us look bad. So I just grabbed France/Germany as bigger wealthier countries and kind of the flagships of Europe. France had 18 deaths on the 3rd. they're roughly 5x smaller than us so equivalent of 100 here. Germany had 9 on the 3rd, they're roughly 4x smaller, so equivalent of 36. I did not look at any other countries so I did not cherry pick good numbers (or bad, IDK how they comp to other europe countries). USA had 660 on the 3rd. So keep that in mind if/when you hear this narrative pushed this week. The narrative seems to essentially be trying to normalize setting a low bar and normalizing our comparatively high deaths. Of course one would think this continues to widen with how many more new cases we're getting than EU. If someone has whole EU graph or numbers feel free to add, I could not find it.

[OldSchoolSnapper]

Anyone else just feel "done"? As in, just resigned to the fact that this will be around probably for the next 18-24 months? And that there is really nothing that will be done about it? "Will" being the key word. I'm sure if everyone locked up for a few months it would make a huge difference but from a realistic perspective I just feel like it's clear now that this will run rampant through at least the end of the year and continue to just be an annoying PITA for school, work, entertainment, etc. It sucks. I just feel defeated by all of it and a real sense of depression. I checked out of the news about a month ago, but it just feels like a never-ending 'wait and see' game.

[tmwiese55]

Yea sure seems that way to me as well. I said something yesterday along the lines of how everyday just seems the same as the last(discussion about how it didn't feel like the 4th and how surprising it's July already), which kind of gave me the vibe you're describing there. This is really going to really hit people in the face again if they shut down schools

 

Also, not sure I've seen the PITA acronym used before, not surprising I picked it up quickly haha.

[jerichoholicninja]

Anyone else just feel "done"? As in, just resigned to the fact that this will be around probably for the next 18-24 months? And that there is really nothing that will be done about it? "Will" being the key word. I'm sure if everyone locked up for a few months it would make a huge difference but from a realistic perspective I just feel like it's clear now that this will run rampant through at least the end of the year and continue to just be an annoying PITA for school, work, entertainment, etc. It sucks. I just feel defeated by all of it and a real sense of depression. I checked out of the news about a month ago, but it just feels like a never-ending 'wait and see' game.

 

I've felt that from the beginning. This thing isn't going away until there's a vaccine or an effective treatment. All the lockdowns, masks, etc. are just like the Dutch boy putting his finger in a hole in the dike. It seems like it's helping but it's not going to stop the flood that's coming unless someone fixes all the holes.

[Fear The Chorizo]

Have seen the recent talking point is how deaths haven't spiked yet. I think I said a few pages back too which we're all hoping holds true for a number of reasons such as old people better protected now, earlier testing to catch cases, finding more mild cases, better treatment, etc. There is a lot of reasons this should not go up near the rates of before. But, with the hospitalizations going up in many places you'd think some increase comes soon. Hopefully it's not drastic though. If it is I'm sure everyone pushing that talking point now will quickly acknowledge.

 

but it did lead me down a hole trying to find EU comps on deaths per day now and I couldn't find it. As opposed to the New Cases graphs of EU vs USA that have been everywhere lately, so it was kind of frustrating and I thought odd so it made me curious if something was up trying to make us look bad. So I just grabbed France/Germany as bigger wealthier countries and kind of the flagships of Europe. France had 18 deaths on the 3rd. they're roughly 5x smaller than us so equivalent of 100 here. Germany had 9 on the 3rd, they're roughly 4x smaller, so equivalent of 36. I did not look at any other countries so I did not cherry pick good numbers (or bad, IDK how they comp to other europe countries). USA had 660 on the 3rd. So keep that in mind if/when you hear this narrative pushed this week. The narrative seems to essentially be trying to normalize setting a low bar and normalizing our comparatively high deaths. Of course one would think this continues to widen with how many more new cases we're getting than EU. If someone has whole EU graph or numbers feel free to add, I could not find it.

 

Keep in mind the initial significant outbreak occurred across Europe roughly 3-4 weeks before it happened in the US. So their daily death tallies on a per capita basis right now would reflect where the US may be in a month's time. Also keep in mind the testing per 1,000 people was 1.92 in the US in early July - for Germany (Europe's gold standard for high volume testing) it's roughly 0.8 and for France, well they stopped really testing significantly at the end of April when they were around 0.23 tests/thousand - or at least providing testing data consistently since then. Factor in how differently various countries/regions report COVID deaths/hospitalizations/cases, and it's really easy to see how pointless it is trying to compare any of these datasets that are so dissimilarly constructed. Despite all that, the overall US death curve is trending similarly to that of the European continent's curve, just that it's lagging by a few weeks.

 

What will be very interesting is seeing whether a second spike in actual COVID-related deaths crops up in the US that mirrors this surge in cases - with the prolonged increase to hospitalizations in several states one would think we'd be seeing that by now, but it hasn't really materialized. I'd also caution looking at specific daily US death tallies for this whole week and let the rolling averages level things out before making an educated guess - the 3 day holiday weekend is going to play games with reporting schedules...my gut tells me we won't necessarily see a big increase in nationwide deaths, but we'll see a prolonged length of several hundred daily deaths before it bottoms further out as other metro areas work their way through hot spots and surges - but without throwing infected patients back into nursing homes. New York state was seeing close to 750 people die per day with COVID-19 complications back in early April. I also think this perceived spike in cases across the US has more to do with the fact the confirmed cases from the initial spike in places like New York, Chicago, Boston, and other metro areas we observed back in March/April was many times less than actual infections due to a fraction of the testing being conducted.

 

Europe has essentially discounted the value of PCR testing more of their population as their death rate has gradually declined and as they have reopened things. The US continues to increase testing - particularly PCR "snapshot" COVID-19 tests...that's fine, but I'd really wish they and the rest of the world shift into more of an antibody testing program to track the percentage of people who have already gotten infected and processed the virus. Right now there's probably limited appetite from a pharmaceutical standpoint for that data, as increasing evidence of herd immunity winning the race against an initial vaccine that "might" be 50% effective and a virus that appears to be weakening in terms of symtpoms/lethality over time could render a large scale vaccine push pointless from a global health perspective. Even if that's the case, there's value in developing a vaccine for coronavirus all the way through compared to what they did with SARS - doing so at minimum gives scientists a better jumping off point for the next similar virus.

[OldSchoolSnapper]

Anyone else just feel "done"? As in, just resigned to the fact that this will be around probably for the next 18-24 months? And that there is really nothing that will be done about it? "Will" being the key word. I'm sure if everyone locked up for a few months it would make a huge difference but from a realistic perspective I just feel like it's clear now that this will run rampant through at least the end of the year and continue to just be an annoying PITA for school, work, entertainment, etc. It sucks. I just feel defeated by all of it and a real sense of depression. I checked out of the news about a month ago, but it just feels like a never-ending 'wait and see' game.

 

I've felt that from the beginning. This thing isn't going away until there's a vaccine or an effective treatment. All the lockdowns, masks, etc. are just like the Dutch boy putting his finger in a hole in the dike. It seems like it's helping but it's not going to stop the flood that's coming unless someone fixes all the holes.

 

I don't think the vaccine would even do what most people seem to think. It would still be months, guessing like at least six or so, after that point. A ton of people would refuse it, then there's still a huge accessibility issue. The vaccine might mark the beginning of the end but that's about it.

 

I'm really having doubts about a trip to Japan I have planned for April. Boohoo, I know, but not long ago I was certain that would be ok.

[owbc]

Anyone else just feel "done"? As in, just resigned to the fact that this will be around probably for the next 18-24 months? And that there is really nothing that will be done about it? "Will" being the key word. I'm sure if everyone locked up for a few months it would make a huge difference but from a realistic perspective I just feel like it's clear now that this will run rampant through at least the end of the year and continue to just be an annoying PITA for school, work, entertainment, etc. It sucks. I just feel defeated by all of it and a real sense of depression. I checked out of the news about a month ago, but it just feels like a never-ending 'wait and see' game.

 

It's basically a new normal but with the underlying knowledge that we're on borrowed time...my employer is bleeding money like crazy. Almost every industry that isn't tech is bleeding cash. I don't think people realize how big of a disaster it's going to be when kids can't return to school this fall. It feels like the other shoe hasn't dropped yet.

[FVBrewerFan]

Yea, I think that's why some of us fro the beginning said we have to get back to normal as much as possible once we went through the initial flatten the curve. I've always had the feeling it would be around indefinitely. We can't lock down emotionally, medically, or economically for a year or two...or longer.

[owbc]

Yea, I think that's why some of us fro the beginning said we have to get back to normal as much as possible once we went through the initial flatten the curve. I've always had the feeling it would be around indefinitely. We can't lock down emotionally, medically, or economically for a year or two...or longer.

 

Wait, you think we're doing the correct thing by having our case count the way it is compared with other countries?

[TURBO]

What does PITA stand for?

[FVBrewerFan]

Yea, I think that's why some of us fro the beginning said we have to get back to normal as much as possible once we went through the initial flatten the curve. I've always had the feeling it would be around indefinitely. We can't lock down emotionally, medically, or economically for a year or two...or longer.

 

Wait, you think we're doing the correct thing by having our case count the way it is compared with other countries?

 

No. Things should be opened up even more than they are now. I don't care about comparisons to other countries. We do far more testing than most, I don't trust the numbers from a lot of other countries, and case count isn't that important to me. Death count is the only metric that really matters, and I believe that number is over-stated here. I've heard specific examples from doctors I know in CA an IL where deaths were written up as Covid. Some cases Covid was not the primary cause of death, other case they were never tested for Covid. I have no idea how rampant this is, but when your hospital is paisd for Covid deaths, you're going to have more Covid deaths.

[FVBrewerFan]

What does PITA stand for?

 

First word is Pain