magnet
4925
Good link, but I suspect you didn’t watch past 16:53.
Ace inhibitors may actually protect you against COVID-19
Nobody ever said young people didn’t get seriously ill, only that there’s quite lower mortality in younger age groups.
Most recent data from Italy:
So here’s a question for all you smart people. As scientists around the world race to find ways to slow down or stop this virus, what might progress on that front look like to those of us refreshing this thread constantly?
It’s probably not going to be a big headline trumpeting VACCINE FOUND, right? Is it more likely to be a slow accumulation of smaller articles describing step-by-step progress in existing meds that seem to help combat the virus? Then, in time, we peak and recede? Is there any way to make an educated guess on how the inevitable triumph of medical science gets reported in the coming weeks?
KevinC
4928
Plenty of people have said this, actually. It’s “common knowledge”.
FT says says London may be in total lockdown from Friday. Largely based on comments from the “fully briefed” Sturgeon, but also some from “Johnson’s team”.
Ok, no doctor said young people don’t get seriously ill, only that they don’t seem to be killed by the virus.
Oghier
4931
I don’t look at the CFR rate as much as the hospitalization rate. The prospect of lying in a bed with a tube down my throat for three weeks holds nearly as much fear for me as death.
And the idea of slowly suffocating in the hallway of a hospital rationing ventilators? That’s terrifying. Anyway, I definitely on team stay-the-fork-home, venturing out once a week for groceries.
I’m on a work videoconference marveling at how little I care about what’s being bickered about or what anyone thinks. Who are these colleagues of mine who care? What is wrong with them?
ShivaX
4933
Not a scientist, but I imagine the first big thing will be something that lessens the symptoms.
Something that aids the respiratory system and cuts down on deaths or the like.
But everything I’ve read indicates nothing short of vaccination will make this go away.
High probability of it lingering around for years if that doesn’t happen.
It’s likely to be a fairly gradual build-up. Multiple laboratories and pharma companies are working around the clock on it, obviously, and while they all share a common goal, there is obviously some competition at play too. But also, one of the most important things scientists can do right now is to be skeptical, and so even positive advances are likely to be treated with skepticism to a degree at first that – if a cure/treatment/alleviator/vaccine is found, it will eventually produce results to outstrip the skepticism.
Dude, I’m not even much of a gamer anymore, but I totally read that as “I don’t loot the CFR crate.” I must be regressing in the face of death.
Me three!
SlyFrog
4936
Yeah, I used to do them for a living. I studied them in law school. Stock buybacks are literally used to avoid the distribution tax. They accomplish the same thing. Money paid out to stockholders.
They’re literally taught in corporate finance courses as the way to pay a distribution without actually paying dividends taxes. Why pay a dividend and have it be subject to ordinary income treatment when you can buy back shares and have it be capital gains. It is the same end result - cash out to shareholders. If anything, it is more flexible, as shareholders can opt out if they think the buy back price is too low (unlike dividends, where they literally have to take the money (though they could, of course, always use that money to acquire additional shares)).
Oghier
4937
My whole morning went that way. I am listening to colleagues speculating that everything will be back to normal by summer, and planning for how to get our business rolling again at that point. They sound like crazy people talking about nonsense.
I would say that’s probably the worst-case scenario presented by the Imperial College study.
But what makes Influenza A a manageable public health risk we can live with versus COVID-19 is that we have medical therapies (such as tamiflu) to mitigate the severity of the flu that we do not currently have for C19.
Oghier
4940
There are multiple therapies in testing, some of them on live patients in Italy and China. Some of them seem to help, and it’s not hard to find the early, unpublished, not-yet-peer-reviewed papers describing them.
Not my area of expertise, but I imagine we’re months away from any of them becoming accepted beyond last-ditch compassionate use scenarios, though.
I am comforted by the fact that a whole lot of very smart people are working their asses off on this.
Yeah, right now a lot of the antiviral agents under test are showing positive signs in mitigation and alleviation. Which are both good news as they could shorten the period in which people are contagious and dramatically lower the mortality rate of people who aren’t in the real red zone of high mortality risk.
But…they’re not cures. Yet.
That makes sense. So a gradual worsening and all the emotions and turmoil that go along with that, followed by a gradual easing of the financial/medical burden as progress is made and hot weather slows it down further…
But I’m sticking with my plan to measure progress in days and weeks instead of months or years.
Damn, today’s Italy’s numbers are not so good. 4200 new infections. Still a significant slowing of growth over the last 4 days, but new cases are not dropping yet.
They also have a huge backlog of mild cases that will get tested as complicated cases lower, so it’s going to be hard to see the changes.
In related news, Spain is about to start trying to test the 20k+ suspected cases soon (probably over the next days) so our numbers are going to jump like crazy when that goes off.
