outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

Thanks Kev, that's very helpful.

drug company executives love to cite positive preliminary indications in the rosiest possible terms. it probably annoys the scientists who are doing the work.

They've had a head-start with vaccine development for SARS and MERS, though? September still feels like a pipe-dream but the possibility of a breakthrough isn't as remote as if this were a type of infection they'd never seen before.

Also 'ready' does not necessarily mean 'manufactured in massive quantities for global distribution'.

The vital interests of the people in power, in both governments and corporations, are going to align almost unanimously in favor of doing everything necessary to move a proven vaccine or drug treatment into massive production and distribution ASAP. With the politics of it settled, it becomes purely a logistical problem. Trump's narcissism and incompetence could bog it down in the USA, but the whole world will be acting on this one.

surely you can't be suggesting that we trample on the patent rights of the vaccine developer

SARS (2002) & MERS (2012) vaccines: 0

I think a vaccine would be amazing and it's a bright hope in this era of bleakness, but I would not bet that we see an affordable solution go to market until well after the virus has run its course... again, I hope I'm wrong here.

well, this one isn't going to "run its course"

Patent rights can be transferred through purchase and property rights can be forced into transfer by eminent domain. Just give a one-time payment and license the rights for $1 to all takers.

I disagree. I think with the combination of contact tracing & social distancing, we have a much better chance at detecting & limiting exposure.

(disagreeing with silby there^)

it’s a nasty disease. it’s incredibly dangerous. i am seriously in a spin about this casual talk of heading back to “normal”. what has changed? we’ve made the number of deaths level off through an unprecedented effort of policy and will. it’s been shambolic but distancing has has an effect. but thousands of people are still dying of this every day! that’s.... not good!! and we’re ready to turn up the volume on that number?? i just have no words really

Get your White House gift shop Covid-19 commemorative coin. Regularly $125, but now at a low low price of $100.

Are they insinuating that he is saying homeless people themselves are disgusting? It kind of seems like that, and it also seems clear that’s not what he meant.

― Li'l Brexit (Tracer Hand), Wednesday, April 29, 2020 1:03 PM (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

@Tracer yeah he means the people are disgusting. I wouldn't believe him to think otherwise.

keep in mind they were talking about snake trains w/o doors between cars for a while there before everyone pointed out that without doors the whole train becomes to poop car

snake train! open ended cars you mean? i kinda like em

yeah i mean it makes sense until you have the poop car

xps: The thing that worries me about coronavirus vaccines is the issues faced testing vaccine candidates for 2003 SARS and MERS. Vaccine efforts paused/halted because the vaccine candidates tried caused vaccine-associated hypersensitivity, and in animal models, lung pathology when challenged by live virus. In a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine context, vaccine-associated hypersensitivity could mean the majority of infections that otherwise were mild or asymptomatic have a higher likelyhood of outright acute respiratory syndromes.

I've read that some 90 vaccine candidates are currently in development. We may need that many to find one that confers immunity without hypersensitivity. All praise to those volunteering for early human trials, they're braver than me.

One of the nice things about the fact that pharmaceutical companies are largely all owned by the same three index funds is that it's not in the interests of the index funds for the pharmaceutical companies to makes swingeing profits if that would cripple every other company the index funds invest in (IE every other company) - there's already been a lot of co-operation between them and I'd be amazed if whichever of them comes up with the cure tries for Shrekli-size gouging.

xps:

The traditional method of disposing human waste from trains is to deposit the waste onto the tracks or, more often, onto nearby ground using what is known as a hopper toilet.

Trying to price gouge on a vaccine or drug treatment that could end or control this global pandemic would only be effective as a way of committing corporate suicide. The full weight of the world's governments and people would crush your corporation like a bug.

is shortage of ventilators still an issue in NY?

no, because the peak number of infections was far lower than expected (20k vs. 120k expected) thanks to social distancing... hopefully.

Hotspots are prisons and jails.

Sad but predictable.

the official projections are ridiculous. At this rate we’ll reach 74,000 dead by next week, not August

Yep. Most of the models/projections I've seen assume a normal distribution (perhaps why the Trump administration thinks this is just going to go away as fast as it showed up).

The current distribution shows that it's significantly right-skewed and could have a pretty long tail.

On March 27, as emergency rooms in New York and across the country began filling with coronavirus patients struggling to breathe, President Donald Trump posted on Twitter to urge Ford and General Motors to “START MAKING VENTILATORS, NOW!”

One of the thousands of replies that the tweet attracted struck an equally urgent tone: “We can supply ICU Ventilators, invasive and noninvasive. Have someone call me URGENT.”

Its author was Yaron Oren-Pines, an electrical engineer in Silicon Valley. A specialist in mobile phone technology, he currently has just 75 followers on Twitter and no apparent experience in government contracting or medical devices.

But three days later, New York state paid Oren-Pines $69.1 million. The payment was for 1,450 ventilators — at an astonishing $47,656 per ventilator, at least triple the standard retail price of high-end models.

Not a single ventilator ever arrived.

nice

we are already at 61,000+ deaths and losing 2000+ more each day. assuming a normal distribution at this point is gaslighting

the amount of newly printed money going to places that have no reason to get exponentially richer during this...sigh. I can blame people but it's just accepted at this point. No one cares.

am i wrong in thinking that ventilators are beginning to be acknowledged as not the best option for severe COVID patients unless it's that or death?

i think it's more now they are more prepared and have more time to start better therapies before it gets to ventilator level.

i feel like governments are looking at the flattening curve and going 'Wow! I guess the virus is getting... less deadly!'

It's fucked up. Israel is now also deconfining precipitously, while Germany is already seeing the virus rise up again after their dumb deconfinement.

The death rate isn't especially relevant to the question of easing lockdown, it's the *infection* rate that matters. Unfortunately most governments don't have anywhere near reliable enough data about the infection rate, whereas they do have a pretty good grasp on how many people are dying. The infection rate needs to be down way below the level it was in early March and that's a gigantic challenge that most governments aren't even close to solving right now.

But see Matt, I stopped drinking and my life improved, so things are better now, which means I can start drinking again.

I might start making plans for things - in the future - once I had a chart in front of me that looked like this:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EW0GLuPUMAAuUt2?format=jpg&name=large

China: We discovered a new virus.
America: So what?

China: It's Dangerous
America: It's only a Flu

China: Wear a Mask
America: Don't wear a Mask
... pic.twitter.com/Qxugv8z73J

— China Xinhua News (@XHNews) April 30, 2020

make sure to watch the video as well

"the world is laughing at us" was one of trump's catchphrases during his 2016 campaign

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/3a8xpn/what-we-know-about-remdesivir-the-antiviral-drug-dr-fauci-says-can-block-this-virus

The stats don't sound that great for late-stage patients. Is the reason that Fauci is excited about this due to its efficacy for early-stage treatment?

I think antivirals commonly help most as an early stage intervention and their efficacy drops the later they are introduced. They also are not 'cures', so much as they reduce severity of symptoms and shorten the length of recovery. But that's still worth being excited about.

that 'bay area CEO' who took 69 million to build these ventilators appears to be a total grifter from my two minute cursory look at his linkedin profile; there's no 'company' he's CEO of, that's the name of his own consulting practice which has nowt to do with ventilators. No idea how he conned NY into paying him; maybe he said he had arrangements to have things manufactured.

“He's always a go-getter. Anytime there's opportunity, he's always been out there trying to help and make a buck,” said Ritter (his former supervisor at Google).

Of interest to those using cough syrup for symptom relief:

A seventh compound – an ingredient commonly found in cough suppressants, called dextromethorphan – does the opposite: Its presence helps the virus. When our partners tested infected cells with this compound, the virus was able to replicate more easily, and more cells died. This is potentially a very important finding, but, and I cannot stress this enough, more tests are needed to determine if cough syrup with this ingredient should be avoided by someone who has COVID-19.

The base is galvanizing the virus

If anyone needs a detailed/well-referenced guide to just how much this administration fucked up the response to the pandemic, this is a good guide:

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/04/trump-coronavirus-timeline/

I don't think I will want to know about that for 30 years or so, give me time to get over it.

there's another one of these articles every day now, does this one have any revelations?

more than 30,000 new cases today in the US, with again more than 2,000 deaths, now almost 1,000,000 active cases

https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/money/agriculture/2020/04/29/trump-order-reopen-meat-packing-plants-create-anxiety-waterloo-farmers-who-face-destroying-pigs/3047760001/

i know this is kind of an obvious point, but people who eat meat should consider eating less meat right now

if you're eating meat, on top of all the other stuff i'm biting my tongue on, you're asking people to risk their lives to perform an "essential service" that is not at at all essential