Capitol Hill Blue Forums Science and Technology Health, Medicine & the healing Sciences Coronavirus: The Plague of The 21st Century?

MASH has the answers...

Interesting idea: What to do when the only antibody test available has a 5% false result rate, meaning a 5% chance the test says you have antibodies but you don't, or it says you don't have them but you do?

Take the test twice, either a few days apart or test both people of a couple. If you get a consistent result, the false result value should drop to 1 in 400. Which is one quarter of the P=0.01 result that usually is quoted in scientific papers. Or if you have a family that was in close contact, test everybody. It's very safe to assume everybody caught it if anybody had it. If everybody tests positive or everybody tests negative for antibodies, the false result level drops exponentially depending on the number of tests.

It gets a little more complicated when repeated tests have different results. This might show an increase or decrease of antibodies over time. Or it might show a very low level of antibodies that is near the threshold of the test. In any event, repeating the test filters out the random element in test failure.

Earlier Deaths Than Reported

Coroners are doing SARS-COV2 testing an people who died and in Santa Clara, California they have found bodies of people who died on February 6th and February 17th with virus present. If you think about the reported case fatality rate reports recently, this means there were at least several hundred cases in California at the time. It would be interesting if coroners all over California could test the remains of everybody who died during February, so we had a better picture.

In other news, Missouri has filed a lawsuit against China for doing exactly what Trump has done. It's just "excite-the-base" fodder, since Republicans are now trying to cast blame on China to obscure the failings of the Trump Administration. But it would be hilarious if the defense called Trump as a witness in the International Court, to talk about how China's actions differed from his. The real difference is they tried covering it up and discounting it's serious nature for a few weeks, while Trump is still doing that.

The Russians also tried covering it up and discounting Chernobyl's serious nature for a few weeks. But at least Chernobyl could be evacuated and closed off. This is like a moveable Chernobyl.
And our president is STILL doing exactly what they did only he's intent on extending his denials all the way till Election Day and opening up our moveable Chernobyl so it can tour the country over and over again, and he has a lot of help from his faithful minions at the state level all through the South.

If Georgia lifts all restrictions and keeps everything open, the potential infectees to the herd immunity point are (70-23)% * 10 million population. That's 4.7 million people. If just 1% of them die, that's 47,000 people. The economic impact of that would be about 470 billion dollars. Can Georgia afford that?

I don't think so. So I predict an opening, a surge in infections and deaths, and then another closure. This will happen in every state that "reopens", because most people are idiots who will go nuts and party, eat out, and hookup with strangers like mad as soon as their state opens. It's going to be like an "all clear" siren that gets everybody out in the street just before the bombs start falling.

States could reopen without that fiasco, but it would require everybody to wear masks whenever out, maintain distance, be very careful with anything that could be contaminated, etc. I think most people will fail miserably at that.

I have found the preliminary testing results from New York and the Theodore Roosevelt intriguing. With lockdowns in place, but exposure inevitable, the infection rate is around 16-18%. The implications are profound. It is estimated that 80% of those that are infected are asymptomatic (although, there may be some overlap in that data). If that were true, this is a 20% infection. 20% are susceptible, 20% are symptomatic, 20% of those are hospitalized, and 20% of those require ICU intervention. That implies an upper end of the disaster in the range of 523,000 ICU beds over the course of the pandemic, and 100,000 deaths. Pretty close to where we're heading. (If we are currently at the peak at 50,000 deaths, we can anticipate another 50,000.)

The new infection rate, R0, is determined by the virus's communicability times our own behavior. If our lockdown was perfect, there would be NO new cases. That is R0 = 0. But our lockdown is far from perfect. In New York City, we are getting it down to R0 = 0.8 or so. That's why new cases are declining. But it's entirely determined by our behavior.

Idiots are already protesting about "Muh Freedom", and Governors are being pressured to open stuff back up. That means R0 > 1, so increased new cases. I'm thinking sensible behavior based on science is just not in the majority of Americans' character. It would be interesting if Trump's base went with Freedumb and 20% of them died when the hospitals get overwhelmed, and the majority of Democrats remain sheltered. That might have a major effect on elections in 2020 and well beyond.

I can see history and civics classes in future decades talking about the poor results of believing "alternate facts" and rejecting expertise.

Interesting video on Youtube today. The Peak Prosperity pathologist looked at the actual risk of hydroxychloroquine, and he found nothing but a lot of hype. No data at all. No risk numbers to make an informed decision on. What he did find is tons of pre-covid19 web pages promoting the use of hydroxychloroquine for malaria control. Including FDA recommendations that never mention anything about heart problems. We've been using chloroquine for over 70 years now, in the millions of doses. You'd think somebody would notice if people were dropping dead on it. Maybe put a little note on the "common side effects" list!

I think we are being hornswaggled here by Big Pharma again. Nobody can make a dime off a 70 year old drug that costs a few pennies. Somebody needs to publish real QT elongation data, and somebody needs to do a real double-blind random drug trial that gives patients hydroxychloroquine and zinc versus placebo tablets, as soon as they detect any symptoms. And please, leave out the azithromycin: That is known to cause QT elongation and lists hydroxychloroquine as a known drug interaction risk.

In fact hydroxychloroquine has been used so much for so long that I suspect more danger of heart problems comes from azithromycin and Covod-19 than from hydroxychloroquine.

link: Peak Prosperity

Trump may be wrong about almost everything, but even a blind pig finds an acorn now and then. I am happy to care more about what works than partisanship.

From pre-covid19 World Health Organization retrospective paper:

I saw a discussion about it in Military Times, I believe it was.
I should have bookmarked it because VA was saying that some vets who used it reported some bad side effects, not all having to do with heart issues either.

I'll have to go look for it again.

Almost every peace corps volunteer in the tropics was on it for all their time in-country. I bet a lot of soldiers in Vietnam were, too. I suspect some of the "bad side effect" reports now may be Covid-19 symptoms, not adverse drug reactions.

You can actually just walk into a drug store in India and buy it over the counter. And I bet lots of people do to fight malaria.