New Covid-19 Thread

[Mega]

Re: New Covid-19 Thread

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...epicentre.html

[jk]

Re: New Covid-19 Thread

there are treatments that may be helpful if given EARLY in the course of the disease, including remdesivir, kaletra and hydroxychloriquine. [almost?] all the studies are done on severely ill patients, when indeed it may be too late for those drugs, at least, to do much good. we need more studies of early identification and early treatment. it is far better to have treatments that keep people out of hospitals than to be of some help once they've reached a significant degree of severity.

of course to do studies of early treatment we need both widespread and reliable testing capabilities, which somehow we seem to have fallen behind on from the very beginning.

[Mega]

Re: New Covid-19 Thread

[Mega]

Re: New Covid-19 Thread

[Woodsman]

Re: New Covid-19 Thread

Gilead Covid-19 Drug May Exceed $2 Billion Sales, Piper Says
By Cristin Flanagan, Bloomberg.com
May 4, 2020, 8:56 AM EDT Updated on May 4, 2020, 2:35 PM EDT

At $4,500 for a round of treatment for Covid-19, remdesivir, Gilead Sciences Inc.’s new medicine could be reasonably priced and still generate over $2 billion in revenue for the biotech, according to analysts at Piper Sandler.

That’s the maximum price that the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review recommended for a 10-day treatment of Gilead’s remdesivir, which received emergency approval from U.S. regulators on Friday. Gilead has so far been quiet on its pricing plans and didn’t immediately respond to e-mailed requests for comment.

When you are talking about saving a life, that $4,500 “seems really reasonable,” Piper Sandler’s Tyler Van Buren said in a phone call. Even after a promise to give away the first 1.5 million vials, the drug could generate more than $2 billion in sales by the end of the year based on that price tag, Van Buren said. He doesn’t expect Gilead to disclose pricing until after the donated supply has been used up. And “several billion in sales are easily achievable” with the number of hospitalized Covid-19 patients remaining high for the foreseeable future...

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...y?srnd=premium

...Gilead gets what they want. No one will want to be in a control arm in further trials and they will argue all future trials must be noninferiority. Before we have the answer whether this drug actually changes anyone’s destiny, it’s going to become the gold standard therapy. We will likely now never know if (the unlikely possibility) it changes mortality.

Absolute genius. You have to salute them. On the day a negative trial of their drug is reported, based on a press release they took over the news cycle, and with some midstream edits to their endpoints their now “positive” trial wins them FDA approval and a halted trial..."

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1...015063042.html

...And neither does the dismissal of Hydroxychloroquine by the medical/pharma cartels as a dangerous and untested drug (despite its decades of safe use) versus their seemingly unanimous consent on the Remdesivir's safety and efficacy despite it being brand new and its fast-tracked approval. We're not supposed to notice that HCQ seems to work well in every country that's tried it, except the United States. That HCQ sells for about a buck a dose versus an expected $1000 a dose for Remdesivir isn't something we proles should concern ourselves with, either. Neither does the financial relationships between Remdesivir manufacturer Gilead Sciences and the NIH panel charged with setting its treatment guidelines. Because conspiracy theory.

[Mega]

Re: New Covid-19 Thread

Your going to love this Woody
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...ial-count.html

Mike

[Mega]

Re: New Covid-19 Thread

& this
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...ment-hold.html

[shiny!]

More Unintended Consequences

More unintended consequences hitting the poorest the hardest:

https://www.azcentral.com/story/opin...es/3043693001/

Self-isolating from COVID-19 in a mobile home? That could be deadly in Arizona

Mark Kear, Margaret Wilder, Patricia Solís, David Hondula and Mark Bernstein, opinion contributors Published 6:05 a.m. MT May 3, 2020

Opinion: What do you do when it is dangerously hot in your house and there is nowhere to go? This will be a life or death question for many this summer.

A record 264 heat-related deaths occurred in Arizona in 2017. Older folks - those most likely to live in hard-to-cool homes and who may need to shelter in place throughout the summer - are most at risk.

Summer is coming. The coronavirus is staying. One-hundred-degree temperatures are already here. Before it gets hotter, we need a plan to help people self-isolating in homes they cannot keep cool.

In 2017, a record 264 heat-related deaths occurred in Arizona. If we act swiftly, we can stop the coronavirus from breaking the record.

We are heat and housing researchers from the University of Arizona and Arizona State University sounding the alarm. In the coming weeks and months, we see catastrophe ahead for too many Arizonans for whom the coronavirus will make it nearly impossible to escape the heat.

Some kinds of homes are more at risk

Most households take for granted their ability to beat the heat by simply staying inside. But, for many staying home does not necessarily mean “cooling off” – especially for those with little or no control over the inside temperature of homes.

These are people struggling to pay utility bills, with little insulation or without air conditioning. In normal times, they would have places to escape to – malls, libraries and restaurants. These are no longer options. Even some public cooling centers are grappling with whether and how to open.

In Arizona and across the country, there are stark inequalities in household capacity to adapt to extreme heat, and COVID-19 will expose and compound these disparities. The impacts of this wicked mixture of insecure housing, pandemic disease and extreme heat will be experienced differently according to income, age, race, and – something that is often overlooked – housing type.

Even as the state re-opens, vulnerable people will still need to stay home, and “Social distancing will be with us through the summer,” according to the White House. For hundreds of thousands of Arizonans, staying home will mean staying in a home built in a factory, commonly referred to as a manufactured or “mobile” home.

Mobile homes are tough to cool

Despite the persistence of worn-out stigmas and stereotypes about “trailer parks,” manufactured housing is a good-quality, energy-efficient and essential source of affordable housing in our state. For many it offers a high quality of life at low cost that allows residents to raise their families and “age in place” in social and supportive environments.

Nevertheless, our research suggests that in Arizona, and in most sunbelt states, the mixture of heat, housing and the coronavirus is likely to be particularly challenging for those communities, where multiple risk factors converge.

These factors intersect most hazardously in the one-third of units in Maricopa and Pima counties built before national building standards were enacted in 1976, with meager insulation and dangerous wiring. These homes are often substandard and prohibitively expensive to cool.

This is particularly true in manufactured home parks where shade is scarce but concrete and asphalt are abundant. These materials absorb heat and slowly release it in the evening, elevating temperatures through the night. Even with air-conditioning, residents struggle to lower temperatures below 90 degrees.
More heat-related deaths occur here

Consider Tanya, a stroke survivor, whose home we measured last summer at 111 degrees, or 97-year-old Albert, whose broken swamp cooler leaked through the ceiling where he sat in front of two fans.

What do you do when it is dangerously hot in your house, even hotter outside, and there is nowhere to go? The coronavirus has limited the options for people like Tanya and Albert, and finding safe ways to provide thermal relief is a matter of life and death.

Manufactured home residents are already over-represented among indoor heat-related deaths. In Maricopa County, 4.9% of housing units are manufactured homes, but they are the scene for 27.5% of indoor heat-associated deaths. Similar patterns likely exist in Pima County, where heat-morbidity data is less available, but climate conditions are similar, the population is poorer, and the proportion of manufactured housing is twice as high.

Many residents of thermally compromised homes are heat-sensitive seniors at highest risk of severe illness from both the coronavirus and heat exposure.

While only 15.7% of Phoenix residents are 65 or older, they make up 59% of those who died indoors from heat-related causes, and head half of all manufactured home households. They also account for more than three-quarters of coronavirus deaths in the state. The people who most need the protection of their homes are the ones most likely to die inside them.

How can we keep people safe?

Of the residents we spoke to in Tucson, 40% struggle to make housing-related payments. Keeping the A/C running may offer respite from the heat, but not from collection agencies. In Arizona, where utility bills are already 6% higher than the national average, a home-bound summer will drive up energy-costs further.

Even before millions lost their jobs and were told to “stay home” a sixth of our interviewees were spending at least 60% of their income on housing-related expenses.

The picture is grim, but there is much that can be done and reason to hope.

Specialized COVID-19 cooling centers must be opened across the state in high concentrations of older manufactured housing. The Centers for Disease Control has already provided governments with guidance on how to do this safely. We can also bring cooling to those sheltered in place with portable evaporative coolers, air conditioners or misters.

Funding and eligibility for the federal Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) must be further expanded. In Arizona, only 5% of those who qualify for LIHEAP actually receive assistance, and some of the most in need, including manufactured housing residents, are not even eligible.

The supply of clean and safe housing needs to be rapidly increased to address the needs of the homeless and marginally housed. This is done for other disasters. Now is an opportunity to upgrade substandard housing with an efficient generation of manufactured homes.

Residents must be allowed to defer rent, loan and utility payments to prevent high electric bills from cascading into crises of eviction, foreclosure and utility shutoffs. Caps must be put in place on debt accrued, and repayments must be spread over time and cancelled or cut for the most vulnerable and hardest hit.

It's going to hit 107 degrees here Wednesday. In every first heatwave of the season, people turn on their A/C for the first time only to discover it doesn't work, it needs repair or replacement. We have a state where a lot of these people have been out of work for over a month. How are they going to be able to afford a new A/C? It's going to be bad.

We're instructing our park managers to make sure they have some emergency window A/C units on hand if needed. Even if the tenant owns their own home we don't want them to die from heatstroke.

[Woodsman]

Re: New Covid-19 Thread

Haven't you heard? Almost everybody who dies in hospital during this pandemic dies of COVID-19. So let it be written, so let it be done.

[Mega]

Re: New Covid-19 Thread

I said it before, because of the "Lockdown" (Post China/carbon world) "They" required a DEATH count.
Like General Westmoreland in "Nam" the bigger the body count the bigger the victory

[Woodsman]

Re: New Covid-19 Thread

...Like General Westmoreland in "Nam" the bigger the body count the bigger the victory

The American experience in Vietnam and the "war at home" is so profoundly apt a metaphor for the COVID-19 response, I'm embarrassed that I didn't consider it until you now just mentioned, Mike.

Looking at it through that lens immediately brings many otherwise baffling decisions into startlingly clear focus. You've (almost) motivated me to dig up my long-unfinished dissertation! Thanks for the knock upside the head, Mega.

[Mega]

Re: New Covid-19 Thread

Your welcome,

[thriftyandboringinohio]

Re: New Covid-19 Thread

[Woodsman]

Re: New Covid-19 Thread

Kind of ironic, isn't it? First Neil f*cks the entire world with his silly models, only to wind up f*cking himself by f*cking a married woman and getting caught.

Exclusive: Government scientist Neil Ferguson resigns after breaking lockdown rules to meet his married lover

Prof Ferguson allowed the woman to visit him at home during the lockdown while lecturing the public on the need for strict social distancing
By Anna Mikhailova • The Telegraph • 5 May 2020 • 7:17pm

The scientist whose advice prompted Boris Johnson to lock down Britain resigned from his Government advisory position on Tuesday night as The Telegraph can reveal he broke social distancing rules to meet his married lover.




Professor Neil Ferguson allowed the woman to visit him at home during the lockdown while lecturing the public on the need for strict social distancing in order to reduce the spread of coronavirus. The woman lives with her husband and their children in another house.


The epidemiologist leads the team at Imperial College London that produced the computer-modelled research that led to the national lockdown, which claimed that more than 500,000 Britons would die without the measures.


Prof Ferguson has frequently appeared in the media to support the lockdown and praised the "very intensive social distancing" measures.


The revelation of the "illegal" trysts will infuriate millions of couples living apart and banned by the Government from meeting up during the lockdown, which is now in its seventh week.


On at least two occasions, Antonia Staats, 38, travelled across London from her home in the south of the capital to spend time with the Government scientist, nicknamed Professor Lockdown.


The 51-year-old had only just finished a two-week spell self-isolating after testing positive for coronavirus.


Prof Ferguson told the Telegraph: "I accept I made an error of judgment and took the wrong course of action. I have therefore stepped back from my involvement in Sage [the government's Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies].


"I acted in the belief that I was immune, having tested positive for coronavirus, and completely isolated myself for almost two weeks after developing symptoms.


"I deeply regret any undermining of the clear messages around the continued need for social distancing to control this devastating epidemic. The Government guidance is unequivocal, and is there to protect all of us."
.
.
.
The first of Ms Staat's visits, on Monday March 30, coincided with a public warning by Prof Ferguson that the one-week-old lockdown measures would have to remain until June.


Ms Staats, a left-wing campaigner, made a second visit on April 8 despite telling friends she suspected that her husband, an academic in his 30s, had symptoms of coronavirus.


She and her husband live together with their two children in a £1.9 million home, but are understood to be in an open marriage. She has told friends about her relationship with Prof Ferguson, but does not believe their actions to be hypocritical because she considers the households to be one.


But one week before the first tryst, Dr Jenny Harries, the deputy chief medical officer, and Matt Hancock, the Health Secretary, clarified during the daily Downing Street press conference that couples not living together must stay apart during lockdown...Ms Staats declined to comment.



https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/202...igns-breaking/

[shiny!]

Re: New Covid-19 Thread

He should be confined in a small room with a bunch of coughing, hacking covid-19 patients.