Coronavirus Thread

[Deleted member 2897]

The guy is book smart, but that’s about as far as it goes:
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opin...-peter-navarro-editorials-debates/5439374002/

 

[Deleted member 2897]

There are now hundreds (yes hundreds) of testing sites inFlorida reporting 100% positives. That’s impossible. WTH is going on with testing and the data?
https://www.wjhg.com/2020/07/10/bay-county-covid-19-positivity-rate-concerns/

 

[JacketRacket]

There are now hundreds (yes hundreds) of testing sites inFlorida reporting 100% positives. That’s impossible. WTH is going on with testing and the data?
https://www.wjhg.com/2020/07/10/bay-county-covid-19-positivity-rate-concerns/

Yeah good catch. I think it's mostly small clinics that don't report negative tests.

Nate Silver (538) did a couple of tweets about that explaning what may be going on (as well as why you may see such varying state wide percentages day to day:









I'd be more concerned if it was larger hospitals/percentages reporting like this.

 

[Deleted member 2897]

Yeah good catch. I think it's mostly small clinics that don't report negative tests.

Nate Silver (538) did a couple of tweets about that explaning what may be going on (as well as why you may see such varying state wide percentages day to day:









I'd be more concerned if it was larger hospitals/percentages reporting like this.

You have to wonder when someone like Orlando Health says the data is wrong and its not 98% positive, its 9.4%. That's not even in the same galaxy. Also, if schools and other things are dependent upon the percent positive test results, all the regulations and procedures are going to be messed up. This is crazy to have stuff like this going on this far into it.

 

[JacketRacket]

You have to wonder when someone like Orlando Health says the data is wrong and its not 98% positive, its 9.4%. That's not even in the same galaxy. Also, if schools and other things are dependent upon the percent positive test results, all the regulations and procedures are going to be messed up. This is crazy to have stuff like this going on this far into it.

Yeah, I wish we used the shutdown periods to create a larger nationwide or even statewide standards on testing, reporting, hospitalizations, and deaths.

Instead we get exacttly what you're describing where the testing data is inconsistent or hard to use. And even if you look across states for comparing response effectiveness, it gets a lot harder than it really should be.

It'd also help make planning reopenings a lot easier too since you'd have a more exact pulse.

It's very frustrating, especially when we look at the numbers each day as closely as we do.

 

[Deleted member 2897]

Yeah, I wish we used the shutdown periods to create a larger nationwide or even statewide standards on testing, reporting, hospitalizations, and deaths.

Instead we get exacttly what you're describing where the testing data is inconsistent or hard to use. And even if you look across states for comparing response effectiveness, it gets a lot harder than it really should be.

It'd also help make planning reopenings a lot easier too since you'd have a more exact pulse.

It's very frustrating, especially when we look at the numbers each day as closely as we do.

Yep. Unfortunately it’s probably a legacy of having to break the CDC and FDA so we could even do any significant testing.

 

[Deleted member 2897]

Yep. Unfortunately it’s probably a legacy of having to break the CDC and FDA so we could even do any significant testing.

Good timing - the HHS today announced they are taking over state/hospital data aggregation from the CDC, stating their database flexibility and capabilities were woefully inadequate.

 

[Techster]

Jockeys were short on social distancing it seems...

 

[Deleted member 2897]

Jockeys were short on social distancing it seems...

That’s kind of what they get for horsing around during a pandemic.

 

[LibertyTurns]

You have to wonder when someone like Orlando Health says the data is wrong and its not 98% positive, its 9.4%. That's not even in the same galaxy. Also, if schools and other things are dependent upon the percent positive test results, all the regulations and procedures are going to be messed up. This is crazy to have stuff like this going on this far into it.

We run off Quest in my area and the hospital backed down a bit from its 50% claim of false positives. They’re thinking it’s closer to 30%. That makes the numbers smaller but does not knock the mountain down to a hill. It’s still a mountain just not Everest or McKinley, more like Clingmans Dome.

 

[RamblinRed]

Good timing - the HHS today announced they are taking over state/hospital data aggregation from the CDC, stating their database flexibility and capabilities were woefully inadequate.

I don't expect it to improve at all based on where its moving to.
Wouldn't shock me if it gets worse since we are talking about having to rebuild from ground up.

 

[Techster]

I don't expect it to improve at all based on where its moving to.
Wouldn't shock me if it gets worse since we are talking about having to rebuild from ground up.

This isn't worrying at all. (<-- sarcasm)

 

[Techster]

Oh boy.... The guy is literally getting booed.

 

[Deleted member 2897]

This isn't worrying at all. (<-- sarcasm)

Honestly with how terrible they’ve been, I’d be fine with blowing up their headquarters and starting over.

 

[Deleted member 2897]

Oh boy.... The guy is literally getting booed.

In S.C. we had a very detailed plan with 3 options - all virtual, hybrid, or onsite...based on infection rates. School Districts have been working hard to reconfigure buses, order and install plastic desk shields, etc. then the Governor comes out today out of the blue and states it is a hard requirement from Day 1 that every school district must allow onsite schooling 5 days a week if any parents want it. He stood there by himself because nobody from any district or the state education department accepted his invite to the press conference once he told them his plan. If he would have had a room like that, they would have thrown tomatoes at him, and rushed the stage to pants him. If they polled his announcement, I wouldn’t be surprised if it got a 15% approval rating. It’s completely unworkable for like 10 different reasons. And if infections are reasonable, the kids will be there anyway, but I’m planned and predictable amounts.

 

[BuzzStone]

In South Carolina we went from having no clear detailed plan to no detailed plan with mandatory face to face schooling 5 days a week starting at some point this year.

 

[Deleted member 2897]

In South Carolina we went from having no clear detailed plan to no detailed plan with mandatory face to face schooling 5 days a week starting at some point this year.

There is a clear 50 page plan you should read. It’s been out for almost a month. I’ve linked to it before. Sounds like your own district is behind the 8-ball and hasn’t done anything to prepare for school.

What happened yesterday was the Governor unilaterally ripped it up and created a new mandatory plan out of the blue which is not only inconsiderate but it’s also unworkable. I suspect he will recant within the week. If not, I expect individual districts to ignore him.

 

[MWBATL]

Meanwhile, more (latest) info on hydroxychloroquin, the drug that Trump touted and everyone else then denounced because....Trump.....

This is from an article in today's Wall Street Journal:

The Food and Drug Administration issued an emergency use authorization on March 28, allowing hospitals to treat Covid-19 patients outside clinical trials using HCQ donated by manufacturers to the national stockpile. But on June 15 the agency rescinded the authorization. “In light of ongoing serious cardiac adverse events and other potential serious side effects,” the FDA announced, “the known and potential benefits of . . . hydroxychloroquine no longer outweigh the known and potential risks for the authorized use.”

But the scientific basis for the revocation now appears faulty. Most studies didn’t adjust results for confounding variables such as disease severity, drug dosage or when patients started treatment. Two new peer-reviewed studies find that HCQ can significantly reduce mortality in hospitalized patients. With hospital beds filling up across the American South and West and a limited supply of Gilead Sciences ’ antiviral remdesivir, the FDA should reinstate its emergency-use authorization for HCQ.

HCQ has been safely used for decades to treat patients with lupus and rheumatoid arthritis, both inflammatory autoimmune conditions. The drug has also been found to interfere with the novel coronavirus’s replication in vitro, and studies this spring from France, Brazil and China showed the drug might help moderately ill patients.

HCQ also has side effects. It can cause cardiac arrhythmias, a particular risk for severely ill Covid-19 patients because the virus can damage heart tissue. But the FDA emergency authorization warned about this and required doctors to monitor patients closely and report adverse side effects to the agency.

In late May, the Lancet published a large-scale international study that claimed hospitalized Covid-19 patients treated with HCQ were 30% more likely to die. But the medical journal retracted the study on June 4 after more than 120 scientists pointed out significant flaws in the data and methodology. The source of the raw data refused to share it with independent reviewers.

Nonetheless, the anti-Trump media claimed vindication later that day when the New England Journal of Medicine published a randomized trial that concluded HCQ didn’t prevent illness in people who had been exposed to the virus. The study’s raw data showed that people who took HCQ within two days of exposure were 38% less likely to develop symptoms. But a third of subjects in the trial took the drug four days after exposure, which obscured its benefits. Since the average viral incubation period is five days, starting the drug four days after exposure is unlikely to do much good.

On June 5, University of Oxford researchers reported that a midpoint review of their HCQ trial had found no clinical benefit. “This result should change medical practice worldwide,” Oxford epidemiologist Martin Landray declared in a press release. It usually pays to be skeptical of such sweeping claims based on a single study.

The Oxford team released a preprint study with more data from its trial on Wednesday. Patients were treated on average nine days after their symptom onset, which may have been too late to improve clinical outcomes. The trial’s protocol also called for dosages two to three times as high as those recommended by the FDA’s emergency use authorization.

In revoking the authorization 10 days later, the FDA cited the New England Journal and Oxford work as well as a British Medical Journal study from China that purportedly found no benefit from the drug. Yet an April draft of the last study concluded that HCQ accelerated “the alleviation of clinical symptoms, possibly through anti-inflammatory properties” and “might prevent disease progression, particularly in patients at higher risk.”

The draft also noted that after adjusting for the confounding effects of other antivirals used to treat patients, “the efficacy of HCQ on the alleviation of symptoms was more evident.” This analysis of HCQ’s benefits was scrubbed from the published version because some editors and reviewers quibbled that it wasn’t called for in the trial protocol.

The first of the new studies showing benefits from HCQ appeared in the Journal of General Internal Medicine on June 30. It found patients treated with the drug at New York’s Mount Sinai Health System hospitals were 47% less likely to die after adjusting for confounding variables such as underlying health conditions and disease severity. Notably, Mount Sinai’s treatment protocol called for lower dosages than in the Oxford trial, and patients on average were treated within one day of hospitalization.

The second, published July 1 in the International Journal of Infectious Diseases, found that patients treated with HCQ at Henry Ford Health System hospitals in Detroit were 50% to 66% less likely to die after adjusting for confounding variables including other treatments. Nearly all patients began treatment within two days of admission, received dosages that hewed closely to FDA guidelines, and were continuously monitored for cardiac arrhythmias.


“Our patient population received aggressive early medical intervention, and were less prone to development of myocarditis, and cardiac inflammation commonly seen in later stages of COVID-19 disease,” the Henry Ford doctors noted.

This shouldn’t be surprising. An FDA safety review published July 1 reported only five adverse side effects from HCQ through the emergency use authorization among tens of millions of doses that were distributed to hospitals. This suggests that the drug isn’t harmful to the vast majority of patients who are treated according to FDA guidelines.

With hundreds of Covid-infected Americans still dying each day, the agency should let physicians decide whether to treat patients with HCQ based on their experience and scientific evidence. Leave politics out of it.
_______________________________________________________________________________

 

[BuzzStone]

There is a clear 50 page plan you should read. It’s been out for almost a month. I’ve linked to it before. Sounds like your own district is behind the 8-ball and hasn’t done anything to prepare for school.

What happened yesterday was the Governor unilaterally ripped it up and created a new mandatory plan out of the blue which is not only inconsiderate but it’s also unworkable. I suspect he will recant within the week. If not, I expect individual districts to ignore him.

You have a different definition of a clear detailed plan than everyone else. You have refused to talk about the actual details of how their "guidelines" would work.

But yes our Governor showed the world what happens when you are in way over your head and think you are the smartest person around.

 

[Supersizethatorder-mutt]

Meanwhile, more (latest) info on hydroxychloroquin, the drug that Trump touted and everyone else then denounced because....Trump.....

This is from an article in today's Wall Street Journal:

The Food and Drug Administration issued an emergency use authorization on March 28, allowing hospitals to treat Covid-19 patients outside clinical trials using HCQ donated by manufacturers to the national stockpile. But on June 15 the agency rescinded the authorization. “In light of ongoing serious cardiac adverse events and other potential serious side effects,” the FDA announced, “the known and potential benefits of . . . hydroxychloroquine no longer outweigh the known and potential risks for the authorized use.”

But the scientific basis for the revocation now appears faulty. Most studies didn’t adjust results for confounding variables such as disease severity, drug dosage or when patients started treatment. Two new peer-reviewed studies find that HCQ can significantly reduce mortality in hospitalized patients. With hospital beds filling up across the American South and West and a limited supply of Gilead Sciences ’ antiviral remdesivir, the FDA should reinstate its emergency-use authorization for HCQ.

HCQ has been safely used for decades to treat patients with lupus and rheumatoid arthritis, both inflammatory autoimmune conditions. The drug has also been found to interfere with the novel coronavirus’s replication in vitro, and studies this spring from France, Brazil and China showed the drug might help moderately ill patients.

HCQ also has side effects. It can cause cardiac arrhythmias, a particular risk for severely ill Covid-19 patients because the virus can damage heart tissue. But the FDA emergency authorization warned about this and required doctors to monitor patients closely and report adverse side effects to the agency.

In late May, the Lancet published a large-scale international study that claimed hospitalized Covid-19 patients treated with HCQ were 30% more likely to die. But the medical journal retracted the study on June 4 after more than 120 scientists pointed out significant flaws in the data and methodology. The source of the raw data refused to share it with independent reviewers.

Nonetheless, the anti-Trump media claimed vindication later that day when the New England Journal of Medicine published a randomized trial that concluded HCQ didn’t prevent illness in people who had been exposed to the virus. The study’s raw data showed that people who took HCQ within two days of exposure were 38% less likely to develop symptoms. But a third of subjects in the trial took the drug four days after exposure, which obscured its benefits. Since the average viral incubation period is five days, starting the drug four days after exposure is unlikely to do much good.

On June 5, University of Oxford researchers reported that a midpoint review of their HCQ trial had found no clinical benefit. “This result should change medical practice worldwide,” Oxford epidemiologist Martin Landray declared in a press release. It usually pays to be skeptical of such sweeping claims based on a single study.

The Oxford team released a preprint study with more data from its trial on Wednesday. Patients were treated on average nine days after their symptom onset, which may have been too late to improve clinical outcomes. The trial’s protocol also called for dosages two to three times as high as those recommended by the FDA’s emergency use authorization.

In revoking the authorization 10 days later, the FDA cited the New England Journal and Oxford work as well as a British Medical Journal study from China that purportedly found no benefit from the drug. Yet an April draft of the last study concluded that HCQ accelerated “the alleviation of clinical symptoms, possibly through anti-inflammatory properties” and “might prevent disease progression, particularly in patients at higher risk.”

The draft also noted that after adjusting for the confounding effects of other antivirals used to treat patients, “the efficacy of HCQ on the alleviation of symptoms was more evident.” This analysis of HCQ’s benefits was scrubbed from the published version because some editors and reviewers quibbled that it wasn’t called for in the trial protocol.

The first of the new studies showing benefits from HCQ appeared in the Journal of General Internal Medicine on June 30. It found patients treated with the drug at New York’s Mount Sinai Health System hospitals were 47% less likely to die after adjusting for confounding variables such as underlying health conditions and disease severity. Notably, Mount Sinai’s treatment protocol called for lower dosages than in the Oxford trial, and patients on average were treated within one day of hospitalization.

The second, published July 1 in the International Journal of Infectious Diseases, found that patients treated with HCQ at Henry Ford Health System hospitals in Detroit were 50% to 66% less likely to die after adjusting for confounding variables including other treatments. Nearly all patients began treatment within two days of admission, received dosages that hewed closely to FDA guidelines, and were continuously monitored for cardiac arrhythmias.


“Our patient population received aggressive early medical intervention, and were less prone to development of myocarditis, and cardiac inflammation commonly seen in later stages of COVID-19 disease,” the Henry Ford doctors noted.

This shouldn’t be surprising. An FDA safety review published July 1 reported only five adverse side effects from HCQ through the emergency use authorization among tens of millions of doses that were distributed to hospitals. This suggests that the drug isn’t harmful to the vast majority of patients who are treated according to FDA guidelines.

With hundreds of Covid-infected Americans still dying each day, the agency should let physicians decide whether to treat patients with HCQ based on their experience and scientific evidence. Leave politics out of it.
_______________________________________________________________________________

And yet amazingly I still read an editorial by some (to me) totally unknown writer yesterday calling HCQ a total failure, citing a young Florida man who "took HCQ" and died. If the HCQ wasn't prescribed by his doctor, and it was at least inferred that it wasn't, then why was he taking it?