Personal aside: A dear friend of mine has come down with the Chicom Flu. He's older and has medical problems. That means he's in the highest of high risk groups. Prayers are welcome.
Personal message to China: Please stop eating bats. Please. Stop. No more bats. Stop eating them. Now.
On with the show.
Graphs like this are nonsense. Please don't tell our "journalists." They'll just ignore you and continue carrying water for the CCP.
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| Viruses loose in a population of more than 1 billion don't level off like this. Ever. |
Elsewhere, people are trumpeting a "leveling off" of the curves in Italy, NYC and Upper Slobolvia. So what? It's happening with an economic tourniquet applied. The real question is what happens when we go back to normal.
Right now, it's all about finding treatments, mass testing for antibodies and getting a vaccine.
Treatments
The French doctor who touted chloroquine is taken to the woodshed here. Why? What's the point of analyzing his research any more? He was an alarm bell to get us to look at chloroquine. Now that lots of people are using it, we should be getting tons more data. Even if it isn't quadruple-blind, FDA-approved, fully diverse and approved by transgender 9-year-olds, we ought to be able to eyeball the tables and get some clues. Stop nitpicking the French dude. The world has moved way past him and his 80-person trial.
If you want to know about treatments in layman's language, I highly recommend watching Tucker Carlson's show every night. He's got a regular contributor who explains them in rational, measured tones.
Racist Testing
Tucker also had on some Navy dude who is working for HHS to talk about testing. He said we're a few weeks away from being able to test the general population. If we test for antibodies, we can start getting back to normal. If it were me, I'd institute a racist national ID card whose embedded racist data included your racist Chicom Flu antibody status. A racist could scan it and find out if you were safe to allow you to shop, work and play with other racists.
Of course, we all know that ID cards are racist, so maybe we can't do that.
Humor
A friend sent this one to me. I laughed, so I figured I'd share it. I hope you stay safe and have a great day.
Hey, I Just heard a Dr. on TV saying that during this time of Coronavirus while staying at home we should focus on inner peace. To achieve this we should always finish things we start and we all could use more calm in our lives. I looked through my house to find things I’d started and hadn't finished, so I finished off a bottle of Merlot, a bottle of Chardonnay, a bodle of Baileys, a butle of wum, tha mainder of Valiumun srciptuns, an a box a chocletz. Yu haf no idr how feckin fablus I feel rite now. Sned this to all who need inner piss. An telum u luvum. And two hash yer wands, stafe day avrybobby!!!
" What's the point of analyzing his research any more? "
ReplyDeleteThe point is that he had a head start over everyone else, and so if anyone was going to find whether there was an effect or not, it was highly likely that he was going to find it first. And he apparently pooched it, producing a bunch of data that you can't even eyeball for trends, let alone prove anything. I suspect he was so in love with his own idea that he couldn't bring himself to admit that it didn't actually work, and so intentionally published inconclusive data. So now we have to wait on all the people who started weeks later, hoping that at least one of them has the integrity and fortitude to do it right, and a lot of time is lost.
So now you say, "So what? Why not just use it on spec, just in case it works?" Well, there is the little detail that hydroxychloroquine is not harmless. The toxic dose is not much higher than the therapeutic dose, and there is a real risk of poisoning people instead of saving them. If it doesn't actually do any good, then giving it to people who don't need it is just adding one more damned thing that can go wrong. Just to be clear, I would be ecstatic if it turned out that hydroxychloroquine or one of its derivatives turned out to be the miracle cure it is being touted as. But, if on the other hand it turns out to do nothing, then I want to know that, too, and as soon as possible so we can avoid wasting time and money on it while potentially poisoning people who are already deathly sick.
Plus, if you want to start using "plausible but unproven" therapies just in case, which ones are you going to use? I just saw someone proposing sniffing copper oxide powder like snuff to line your nasal passages with copper, killing the viruses on the way in. Is this plausible? If someone thinks it is, does that mean we should immediately jump to recommending that everyone use it, without checking to see if it, well, actually does anything useful?
Prescribing drugs because you think they ought to do something, without checking to be sure they actually do something, strikes me as the hallmark of medieval medicine, which mostly ranged from ineffectual to lethal. We have the capability to test things properly, and given the hundreds of possible things that you could plausibly give people as drugs, not doing the testing correctly verges on criminal.
Agreed on all points. However, my original point also remains: that train has left the station. There are plausible explanations for how HC + AZ + Zn might work as well as anecdotes that don't come from French crackpots. With 100K cases to pull from, we ought to have decent data to start making decisions.
ReplyDeleteSay that the crackpot got us started down a blind alley a week ago. Well, tomorrow it's going to be a week plus a day and then it will be a week plus two days. We don't have a time machine, so we can't change that. Put the crackpot on the shelf and see what the bigger data sets are saying.
As for side effects and the risks of thrashing around, let me ask you: What is the mortality rate for the complete breakdown of society? My bet is that it's a bit north of 1-2%.
I'll close with an apt Star Trek reference.
SPOCK: Message from the captain.
SCOTT: Tell him I'm doing my best. If I cut through the wrong circuits...
SPOCK: We have fourteen minutes left.
SCOTT: Even if we were under a full-scale attack I couldn't move any faster, not and maintain a safety factor.
SPOCK: At the rate you're proceeding, calculations show that you'll take a minute and a half more than we have left. You can't afford a safety factor.
Dig what's going on in Brazil. They're just punting on the whole shutdown thing.
ReplyDeleteTime for a Second Opinion.
ReplyDeleteI like the Star Trek reference, I don't agree with not trying those drugs, they are well established with known side effects, the side effects of not using them on very sick patients are worse.
ReplyDeletePS. If I were really sick with it, I'd want the drugs and I wouldn't take kindly to some silly politician/bureaucrat telling me I couldn't.
ReplyDeleteQuestioning Conventional Wisdom.
ReplyDeleteDr. Fauci.
ReplyDeleteMadness and Maddow.
ReplyDelete