re: Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) ***W.H.O. DECLARES A GLOBAL PANDEMIC***

GOP my understanding is that if you’re positive you’re considered “recovered” when you get two negative tests. So some of those 8000 people could test positive for antibodies meaning they had it but if the rapid covid 19 test for current disease (which is what was done as antibody tests aren’t being done yet) shows negative, that does not mean anything regarding their past status. Just the current one.

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Uh, yeah they do. If vast swaths of the public were getting the virus and developing antibodies right now, a significant portion of them would have to be currently positive for the virus.

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Not if its been running its course here since last Dec or early January is as being assumed now.

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would love to see the mathematical model for how hundreds of millions across the world have gotten the virus and developed antibodies, when random testing shows that asymptomatics no more than the number of those with symptoms. Please show me how that math works

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I didn’t claim hundreds of millions developed antibodies... Direct your question at the person that posted it. Just pointing out your fricked up assumption that because people aren’t testing positive now that it automatically means a large group hasn’t had it or isn’t immune to it.

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Yeesh. I really thought that would come down as time goes on

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If testing is limited it will only go up.

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I think hydroxychloroquine may be effective as it has shown positive outcomes against viruses in the past. But it is not an ideal solution since it is not something people with heart conditions can take. And unfortunately that is a large percentage of people getting hospitalized.

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I'm sorry, but you don't know what you are talking about. If that's an honest mistake due to listening to news reports with a non-medical agenda, then you're being informed right now. "Heart disease" is a very non-specific term and it includes hundreds of different pathologies with different causes, treatments, and associated contraindicated medications.

Using "heart disease" as a contraindication to hydroxychloroquine is like using "lung disease" as a contraindication for beta blockers, i.e., meaningless and incorrect. Hydroxychloroqunine and chloroquine can cause an arrhythmia in people with a certain class of cardiac conduction defect. That can be checked for and avoided, as it most certainly has been for many decades. Hydroxychloroquine has almost certainly been used in untold millions of patients with "heart disease" with no problem at all.

My advice; don't try to use your wikipedia knowledge to pass for an understanding of medical science and practice.

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What’s the US at?

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I didn't make that graphic but it really should be nCFR, we don't know what the CFR or IFR are at this point. We can use the current data to calculate cCFR but that will be higher than nCFR at this stage in the game.

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Not if its been running its course here since last Dec or early January is as being assumed now.

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Where are the deaths in January? Let me get this straight ... you think that the virus was sweeping across the country back then but not killing anyone? And, now, it's killing lots of people, but it's not infecting lots of asymptomatic people, because everyone's already gotten it.

I mean, that's brilliant.

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Where are the deaths in January? Let me get this straight ... you think that the virus was sweeping across the country back then but not killing anyone?

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Pneumonia kills around 186,000 people annually, why a person acquired pneumonia is not always known, it is likely that some of the pneumonia deaths earlier in the year were related to COVID19

Episode 2 of Some Good News (SGN) with John Krasinski

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I stand corrected... I do not know the ends and outs of that particular drug. I will correct my post.

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Hydroxychloroquine is like most drugs that are approved and on the market; safe when used appropriately because that's generally the standard necessary to proceed to efficacy trials (with some exceptions for dire circumstances, like chemotherapy drugs). But every single drug has side effects; you can peruse the PDR and read what sounds like a horror story on every page. Aspirin and tylenol have a long list of bad, potentially lethal, SE/toxicities if they're used improperly, or sometimes even if they're used as directed. Working with medication risk is a huge part of practicing medicine. If we begin to use hydroxychloroquine widely for Covid-19 like some other countries have apparently done, there will undoubtedly be bad outcomes due to drug side effects or to patient compliance errors, just as there are with any drug taken by a large number of people. If no potential medication deaths is the hurdle, there won't be any treatments.

Unlike the president, I'm not going to suggest that the chloroquine drugs are a game changer, but at times like this we can't wait years for the standard safety and efficacy trials. Hydroxychloroquine has already had the safety trials and has been used for decades, so it's a good prospect for some on-the-fly outcomes data. The drug has long been demonstrated to have antiviral effects in peer reviewed journals, has some preliminary indications of efficacy in Covid-19, and it "should" be very straightforward to run some fast, large comparatitive trials to see if it actually does knock down the viral load when given early after onset of symptoms. If so, that alone could improve outcomes and limit the rate of disease spread. It may even work in more advanced stages of disease by blunting the late, damaging immune response, but that's a higher hurdle. And once a patient is intubated it's much more difficult to achieve good dose levels because there's no IV form of hydroxychloroquine to my knowledge, so that could limit the effectiveness if started later in the course.

If it was my call, I'd start running large active and control arms in young, healthy, mildly symptomatic patients who should survive with or without the drug, simply to test for viral load outcomes. I'd give physicians free rein to treat older and high risk patients as they deem medically appropriate (preferably as early as possible after sx onset IMO). I'd slap down any politician or bureaucrat sticking their nose into that decision making process, at least until we have a better handle on the efficacy question. And I'd tell any pharma manufacturing company that wants to do future business in the US to work very hard to make already marketed drugs available here as needed. What I wouldn't do is wait for some new therapy while we have approved drugs that may help right now.