COVID-19 Megathread 5: The Trumps catch COVID-19

[parochial boy]

As much as anything, how much time and resource has been wasted on doing massive studies of some of these drugs on the basis of them being hyped of the back of dodgy or methodologically unsound initial studies?

[parochial boy]

“The New York Department of Health, for example, made the decision in early April to count deaths in the state that were probably due to COVID-19, but the person was never diagnosed or treated for the disease. The addition raised the national death toll by over 3,700.”

Again, I posit: How can you possibly make any good policy decisions when you have completely inaccurate data. Beyond stupid.

Because... as well as Covid-19 there is another mysterious pneumonia that is killing thousands of New Yorkers that no-one else has picked up on?

[parochial boy]

Something I've wondered: have other countries seen protests in favor of reopening such as those that have occurred in a number of U.S. cities?

See the video in the tweet below, there have been riots in the French banlieues (and in Belgium too). But that is playing into an ages old story of simmering tensions with the police about police brutality and racism and social dislocation in those neighbourhoods.

https://twitter.com/Actu2dinguerie/status/1252373486456037380

[parochial boy]

The Oxford vaccine trials have started, they started injecting volunteers last week, they said in 6 weeks we can expect results of efficacy and side effects, if it works they plan to try to get emergency authorization

Which would mean it'd be ready by the end of the year. Hopefully we can avert or heavily reduce the chances of a second outbreak.

They said if the results in mid-June are very good we could get it by September, some manufacturing companies are already starting to manufacture the vaccine candidate in the event it proves successful. We'll also get initial data sometime in May

Media here are reporting there are currently 7 different potential vaccines in human testing already. 3 Chinese, 2 American, 1 German and the Oxford one. Various fairly serious people seem to think that between those ones and a few others that have been succesful in animal testing means that having a vaccine available before the end of the year is a real possibility.

[parochial boy]

Has the EU restricted international travel at all? If so that's a pretty compelling reason why EU would have a higher case load than the US (and that's ignoring any differences in testing).

Yes, virtually every European country closed or severely restricted border crossings once things got bad. That is around the middle of March, and the travel restrictions came in a messy and un-coordinated way, which inadvertently made things worse for a while. They’ve been reopening them in a more or less co-ordinated way, so as of a few days ago unrestricted travel is possible across the majority of the EU/Schengen zone at least.

Based on some of the revelations that have been coming out recently, quite a few European countries’ health authorities did badly miscalculate and underestimate how nasty and fast spreading the disease was back in February/early March, which helped the explosion in case numbers happen (notably due to carnival season and soccer matches). But the subsequent reaction wasn’t as... demented as in the US (excepting perhaps a certain island nation on the north-western edge of the continent), which explains why things seem a lot better now.

[parochial boy]

It is perplexing to me that the UK still has almost the number of deaths per capita that the US does, while having about 20x fewer cases per capita, despite doing 50% more per capita tests. 

It’s been like that for several weeks.  They have a CFR of 17%!  How is that possible?

It’s because the UK’s testing statistics are lies. They have been doing this thing where they post tests to people to swab themselves and send the results back. Except that two thirds of those tests never actually come back, the ones that do come back are hugely inaccurate as people can’t really swab themselves properly, but despite this the UK has been claiming that they’ve « done » a test from the moment they post it out to the patient.

It’s such a blatant fiction that they’ve had to stop reporting test numbers.

In other words, no matter how badly Trump is managing things, Boris Johnson is hot on his heels for incompetence