COVID-19

VERY STABLE GENIUS: "The germ has gotten so brilliant that the antibiotic can't keep up with it ... there's a whole genius to it ... not only is it hidden, but it's very smart." pic.twitter.com/oXhF2IIBYB

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 10, 2020

happy jack wrote:

Heretic wrote:

happy jack wrote:

Liberal Treated With Hydroxychloroquine Hopes He Still Dies Of COVID-19 To Prove Trump Is Stupid

No satire necessary.

What satire?

Heretic wrote:

happy jack wrote:

What satire?

You thought your article was real?

happy jack wrote:

Did I think the article itself was real?
Of course not.

This is a study from @waynestate, by the way, the university where I'm faculty. It's not truly randomized, but it is depressing. It suggests that, instead of benefiting #COVID19 patients, #Hydroxychloroquine might well cause harm. At the very least, this study shows zero benefit. https://t.co/DC6Shyhd7N

— David Gorski, MD, PhD (@gorskon) April 11, 2020

I've been in contact with docs using #Hydroxychloroquine. They are uniformly unimpressed. At my medical alma mater, @umichmedicine, they've stopped routinely using the drug because they've seen no evidence of efficacy but have seen serious adverse events. https://t.co/FfLc8LXVcu

— David Gorski, MD, PhD (@gorskon) April 11, 2020

Quote :

Should people with COVID-19 take chloroquine or hydroxychloroquine? Do you prescribe them to your patients with COVID-19?

Michigan Medicine just changed its guidelines on prescribing these drugs. There’s a lot of excitement about whether these already existing options for malaria could be useful in COVID-19, but so far that excitement hasn’t materialized in patient care data.

“Our infectious disease division and our antimicrobial pharmacists have reviewed all the available data and we found no convincing evidence that these drugs were effective in treating people with COVID-19,” Kaul says.

That’s consistent with what’s been observed firsthand in Michigan Medicine’s hospitals.

“We haven’t seen any clear evidence of benefit so we aren’t going to use hydroxychloroquine routinely anymore,” Chopra says. “We were initially recommending it to both inpatients and outpatients, but we’re no longer doing that routinely. That’s based upon the fact that we’ve been prescribing hydroxychloroquine for a few weeks, did not see therapeutic benefit, but did see adverse effects.”

Those side effects Chopra has seen in his patients include liver function toxicity, nausea and vomiting.

Quote :

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ general counsel called a representative of the Miami Herald’s law firm seeking to quash a public records lawsuit that would force the state to divulge the names of all elder-care facilities that have had a positive test for the coronavirus.

The back-door pressure — through an attorney that had no involvement in the case — paid off.

The law firm, Holland & Knight, told Sanford Bohrer, a senior partner with decades of representing the Miami Herald, to stand down and abandon the lawsuit.

The suit will still be filed, but by another law firm, said Miami Herald publisher and executive editor Aminda Marqués González.

“We are disappointed that the governor’s office would go so far as to apply pressure on our legal counsel to prevent the release of public records that are critical to the health and safety of Florida’s most vulnerable citizens,” Marques said. “We shouldn’t have had to resort to legal action in the first place. Anyone with a relative in an elder care facility has a right to know if their loved ones are at risk so they can make an informed decision about their care.”

Quote :

Throughout January, as Mr. Trump repeatedly played down the seriousness of the virus and focused on other issues, an array of figures inside his government — from top White House advisers to experts deep in the cabinet departments and intelligence agencies — identified the threat, sounded alarms and made clear the need for aggressive action.

The president, though, was slow to absorb the scale of the risk and to act accordingly, focusing instead on controlling the message, protecting gains in the economy and batting away warnings from senior officials. It was a problem, he said, that had come out of nowhere and could not have been foreseen.

. . .

But dozens of interviews with current and former officials and a review of emails and other records revealed many previously unreported details and a fuller picture of the roots and extent of his halting response as the deadly virus spread:

The National Security Council office responsible for tracking pandemics received intelligence reports in early January predicting the spread of the virus to the United States, and within weeks was raising options like keeping Americans home from work and shutting down cities the size of Chicago. Mr. Trump would avoid such steps until March.

Despite Mr. Trump’s denial weeks later, he was told at the time about a Jan. 29 memo produced by his trade adviser, Peter Navarro, laying out in striking detail the potential risks of a coronavirus pandemic: as many as half a million deaths and trillions of dollars in economic losses.

The health and human services secretary, Alex M. Azar II, directly warned Mr. Trump of the possibility of a pandemic during a call on Jan. 30, the second warning he delivered to the president about the virus in two weeks. The president, who was on Air Force One while traveling for appearances in the Midwest, responded that Mr. Azar was being alarmist.

Mr. Azar publicly announced in February that the government was establishing a “surveillance” system in five American cities to measure the spread of the virus and enable experts to project the next hot spots. It was delayed for weeks. The slow start of that plan, on top of the well-documented failures to develop the nation’s testing capacity, left administration officials with almost no insight into how rapidly the virus was spreading. “We were flying the plane with no instruments,” one official said.

By the third week in February, the administration’s top public health experts concluded they should recommend to Mr. Trump a new approach that would include warning the American people of the risks and urging steps like social distancing and staying home from work. But the White House focused instead on messaging and crucial additional weeks went by before their views were reluctantly accepted by the president — time when the virus spread largely unimpeded.

When Mr. Trump finally agreed in mid-March to recommend social distancing across the country, effectively bringing much of the economy to a halt, he seemed shellshocked and deflated to some of his closest associates. One described him as “subdued” and “baffled” by how the crisis had played out. An economy that he had wagered his re-election on was suddenly in shambles.

He only regained his swagger, the associate said, from conducting his daily White House briefings, at which he often seeks to rewrite the history of the past several months. He declared at one point that he “felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic,” and insisted at another that he had to be a “cheerleader for the country,” as if that explained why he failed to prepare the public for what was coming.

. . .

When Dr. Robert Kadlec, the top disaster response official at the Health and Human Services Department, convened the White House coronavirus task force on Feb. 21, his agenda was urgent. There were deep cracks in the administration’s strategy for keeping the virus out of the United States. They were going to have to lock down the country to prevent it from spreading. The question was: When?

In Washington, the president was not worried, predicting that by April, “when it gets a little warmer, it miraculously goes away.” His White House had yet to ask Congress for additional funding to prepare for the potential cost of wide-scale infection across the country, and health care providers were growing increasingly nervous about the availability of masks, ventilators and other equipment.

. . .

A 20-year-old Chinese woman had infected five relatives with the virus even though she never displayed any symptoms herself. The implication was grave — apparently healthy people could be unknowingly spreading the virus — and supported the need to move quickly to mitigation.

“Is this true?!” Dr. Kadlec wrote back to the researcher. “If so we have a huge whole on our screening and quarantine effort,” including a typo where he meant hole. Her response was blunt: “People are carrying the virus everywhere.”

The following day, Dr. Kadlec and the others decided to present Mr. Trump with a plan titled “Four Steps to Mitigation,” telling the president that they needed to begin preparing Americans for a step rarely taken in United States history.

But over the next several days, a presidential blowup and internal turf fights would sidetrack such a move. The focus would shift to messaging and confident predictions of success rather than publicly calling for a shift to mitigation.

These final days of February, perhaps more than any other moment during his tenure in the White House, illustrated Mr. Trump’s inability or unwillingness to absorb warnings coming at him. He instead reverted to his traditional political playbook in the midst of a public health calamity, squandering vital time as the coronavirus spread silently across the country.

Quote :

During one task force meeting in the Situation Room last month, Trump turned to Fauci and challenged him.

It was the day the administration was adding Ireland and the United Kingdom to its travel restrictions, and Trump wanted to understand why talk of “herd immunity” — allowing the coronavirus to sweep a nation largely unchecked, with the belief that those who survived would then be immune — was such a bad idea.

“Why don’t we let this wash over the country?” Trump asked, according to two people familiar with his comments, a question other administration officials say he has raised repeatedly in the Oval Office.

Fauci initially seemed confused by the term “wash over” but became alarmed once he understood what Trump was asking.

“Mr. President, many people would die,” Fauci said.

Quote :

President Donald Trump lashed out at criticism of his handling of the coronavirus crisis during a grievance-fueled appearance from the White House that featured a propaganda-like video he said was produced by his aides.

The appearance only affirmed the impression that some of Trump's chief concerns amid the global public health disaster are how his performance is viewed in the media and whether he's being fairly judged.

He clearly did not believe that was the case Monday. He stepped to the podium armed with a video meant to frame his response in a positive light after his initial handling of the crisis has come under increasing scrutiny.

After it aired, Trump grew increasingly irate as reporters probed the time line of his response, claiming the criticism wasn't fair and that he'd handled the outbreak effectively.

"Everything we did was right," Trump insisted after an extended tirade against negative coverage.
Pressed later about his authority to reopen parts of the country, Trump delivered an eyebrow-raising statement asserting absolute control over the country.

"When somebody is president of the United States, your authority is total," he said. He later added he would issue reports backing up his claim, which legal experts say isn't supported by the Constitution.

Quote :

A small study in Brazil was halted early for safety reasons after coronavirus patients taking a higher dose of chloroquine developed irregular heart rates that increased their risk of a potentially fatal heart arrhythmia.

Chloroquine is closely related to the more widely used drug hydroxychloroquine. President Trump has enthusiastically promoted them as a potential treatment for the novel coronavirus despite little evidence that they work, and despite concerns from some of his top health officials. Last month, the Food and Drug Administration granted emergency approval to allow hospitals to use chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine from the national stockpile if clinical trials were not feasible. Companies that manufacture both drugs are ramping up production.

The Brazilian study involved 81 hospitalized patients in the city of Manaus and was sponsored by the Brazilian state of Amazonas. It was posted on Saturday at medRxiv, an online server for medical articles, before undergoing peer review by other researchers. Because Brazil’s national guidelines recommend the use of chloroquine in coronavirus patients, the researchers said including a placebo in their trial — considered the best way to evaluate a drug — was an “impossibility.”

Despite its limitations, infectious disease doctors and drug safety experts said the study provided further evidence that chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, which are both used to treat malaria, can pose significant harm to some patients, specifically the risk of a fatal heart arrhythmia. Patients in the trial were also given the antibiotic azithromycin, which carries the same heart risk. Hospitals in the United States are also using azithromycin to treat coronavirus patients, often in combination with hydroxychloroquine.

Quote :

Donald Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, which he once dismissed as a hoax, has been fiercely criticised at home as woefully inadequate to the point of irresponsibility.

Yet also thanks largely to Trump, a parallel disaster is unfolding across the world: the ruination of America’s reputation as a safe, trustworthy, competent international leader and partner.

Call it the Trump double-whammy. Diplomatically speaking, the US is on life support.

“The Trump administration’s self-centred, haphazard, and tone-deaf response [to Covid-19] will end up costing Americans trillions of dollars and thousands of otherwise preventable deaths,” wrote Stephen Walt, professor of international relations at Harvard.

“But that’s not the only damage the United States will suffer. Far from ‘making America great again’, this epic policy failure will further tarnish [its] reputation as a country that knows how to do things effectively.”

This adverse shift could be permanent, Walt warned. Since taking office in 2017, Trump has insulted America’s friends, undermined multilateral alliances and chosen confrontation over cooperation. Sanctions, embargoes and boycotts aimed at China, Iran and Europe have been globally divisive.

Quote :

A small study in Brazil was halted early for safety reasons after coronavirus patients taking a higher dose of chloroquine developed irregular heart rates that increased their risk of a potentially fatal heart arrhythmia.

Chloroquine is closely related to the more widely used drug hydroxychloroquine. President Trump has enthusiastically promoted them as a potential treatment for the novel coronavirus despite little evidence that they work, and despite concerns from some of his top health officials. Last month, the Food and Drug Administration granted emergency approval to allow hospitals to use chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine from the national stockpile if clinical trials were not feasible. Companies that manufacture both drugs are ramping up production.

The Brazilian study involved 81 hospitalized patients in the city of Manaus and was sponsored by the Brazilian state of Amazonas. It was posted on Saturday at medRxiv, an online server for medical articles, before undergoing peer review by other researchers. Because Brazil’s national guidelines recommend the use of chloroquine in coronavirus patients, the researchers said including a placebo in their trial — considered the best way to evaluate a drug — was an “impossibility.”

Despite its limitations, infectious disease doctors and drug safety experts said the study provided further evidence that chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, which are both used to treat malaria, can pose significant harm to some patients, specifically the risk of a fatal heart arrhythmia. Patients in the trial were also given the antibiotic azithromycin, which carries the same heart risk. Hospitals in the United States are also using azithromycin to treat coronavirus patients, often in combination with hydroxychloroquine.

“To me, this study conveys one useful piece of information, which is that chloroquine causes a dose-dependent increase in an abnormality in the ECG that could predispose people to sudden cardiac death,” said Dr. David Juurlink, an internist and the head of the division of clinical pharmacology at the University of Toronto, referring to an electrocardiogram, which reads the heart’s electrical activity.

Quote :

The CIA advised employees that taking an anti-malarial drug that has been touted by President Trump and others as a potential treatment for coronavirus could have potentially dangerous side effects, including death, The Washington Post reported.

The warning was reportedly published on a website for CIA staff with questions related to the coronavirus pandemic late last month.

“At this point, the drug is not recommended to be used by patients except by medical professionals prescribing it as part of ongoing investigational studies. There are potentially significant side effects, including sudden cardiac death, associated with hydroxychloroquine and its individual use in patients need to be carefully selected and monitored by a health care professional,” read a response to an employee who asked whether they should take the drug without a prescription, according to the Post.

“Please do not obtain this medication on your own,” was reportedly added in bold type.

Quote :

For a world grappling with the new coronavirus, it’s becoming increasingly clear that even when the pandemic is over, it won’t really be over.

Now doctors are beginning to worry that for patients who have survived COVID-19, the same may be true.

For the sickest patients, infection with the new coronavirus is proving to be a full-body assault, causing damage well beyond the lungs. And even after patients who become severely ill have recovered and cleared the virus, physicians have begun seeing evidence of the infection’s lingering effects.

In a study posted this week, scientists in China examined the blood test results of 34 COVID-19 patients over the course of their hospitalization. In those who survived mild and severe disease alike, the researchers found that many of the biological measures had “failed to return to normal.”

Chief among the worrisome test results were readings that suggested these apparently recovered patients continued to have impaired liver function. That was the case even after two tests for the live virus had come back negative and the patients were cleared to be discharged.

At the same time, as cardiologists are contending with the immediate effects of COVID-19 on the heart, they’re asking how much of the damage could be long-lasting. In an early study of COVID-19 patients in China, heart failure was seen in nearly 12% of those who survived, including in some who had shown no signs of respiratory distress.

Quote :

President Trump’s inaccurate assertion that he has “total” authority to reopen a nation shuttered by the coronavirus is igniting a fresh challenge from governors scrambling to manage their states and highlighting a Republican Party reluctant to defy a president who has relished pushing the boundaries of executive power.

The president’s claim, first conveyed in a tweet Monday morning and underscored at a White House news conference and subsequent social media posts, caught his aides off guard and prompted them to study whether Trump would have such authority in a time of emergency like the ongoing pandemic.

Republicans were largely tepid in their criticism of Trump’s expansive views on his power, which he has wielded throughout his presidency as he circumvented the legislative branch on matters of spending and subpoenas, while enjoying decisions in which he maintained universal authority such as issuing pardons. Trump has also issued a multitude of executive orders while relying heavily on myriad acting administration officials rather than subjecting them to the Senate confirmation process.

Heretic wrote:

US's global reputation hits rock-bottom over Trump's coronavirus response

Quote :

Donald Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, which he once dismissed as a hoax, has been fiercely criticised at home as woefully inadequate to the point of irresponsibility.

Yet also thanks largely to Trump, a parallel disaster is unfolding across the world: the ruination of America’s reputation as a safe, trustworthy, competent international leader and partner.

Call it the Trump double-whammy. Diplomatically speaking, the US is on life support.

“The Trump administration’s self-centred, haphazard, and tone-deaf response [to Covid-19] will end up costing Americans trillions of dollars and thousands of otherwise preventable deaths,” wrote Stephen Walt, professor of international relations at Harvard.

“But that’s not the only damage the United States will suffer. Far from ‘making America great again’, this epic policy failure will further tarnish [its] reputation as a country that knows how to do things effectively.”

This adverse shift could be permanent, Walt warned. Since taking office in 2017, Trump has insulted America’s friends, undermined multilateral alliances and chosen confrontation over cooperation. Sanctions, embargoes and boycotts aimed at China, Iran and Europe have been globally divisive.

Quote :

A draft national strategy to reopen the country in phases, developed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, emphasizes that even a cautious and phased approach “will entail a significant risk of resurgence of the virus.”

The internal document, obtained by The Washington Post, warns of a “large rebound curve” of novel coronavirus cases if mitigation efforts are relaxed too quickly before vaccines are developed and distributed or broad community immunity is achieved.

About 26,000 people have now died from the coronavirus in the United States, and more than 608,000 cases have been reported.

The framework lays out criteria that should be in place before a region can responsibly ease guidelines related to public gatherings: a “genuinely low” number of cases; a “well functioning” monitoring system capable of “promptly detecting” spikes of infections; a public health system able to react robustly to new cases and local health systems that have enough inpatient beds to rapidly scale up in the event of a surge in cases.

This would seem to necessitate ramping up testing and production of personal protective equipment at levels not currently being done.

Heretic wrote:

Leaked CDC and FEMA plan warns of ‘significant risk of resurgence of the virus’ with phased reopening

Quote :

A draft national strategy to reopen the country in phases, developed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, emphasizes that even a cautious and phased approach “will entail a significant risk of resurgence of the virus.”

The internal document, obtained by The Washington Post, warns of a “large rebound curve” of novel coronavirus cases if mitigation efforts are relaxed too quickly before vaccines are developed and distributed or broad community immunity is achieved.

About 26,000 people have now died from the coronavirus in the United States, and more than 608,000 cases have been reported.

The framework lays out criteria that should be in place before a region can responsibly ease guidelines related to public gatherings: a “genuinely low” number of cases; a “well functioning” monitoring system capable of “promptly detecting” spikes of infections; a public health system able to react robustly to new cases and local health systems that have enough inpatient beds to rapidly scale up in the event of a surge in cases.

This would seem to necessitate ramping up testing and production of personal protective equipment at levels not currently being done.

This will kill people.

Quote :

Russia would accept a “kind offer” by U.S. President Donald Trump to ship ventilators to the country if it felt it needed them to treat people sick with the novel coronavirus, the Kremlin said on Thursday.

Russia, which has so far recorded 27,938 cases and 232 coronavirus-related deaths, shipped ventilators and protective gear this month to the United States after a phone call between Trump and President Vladimir Putin.

Trump told Putin in a recent phone call that the United States could reciprocate as it begins to produce more ventilators, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on a conference call on Thursday.

“If necessary Russia would of course take advantage of this kind offer,” Peskov said.

He did not say whether Moscow would pay for the potential ventilator shipments from the United States nor whether Russia needed them.

Quote :

A devoted grandson learns his grandmother died alone last weekend. The family was never told she had fallen ill. A fragile mother is moved from her room so the senior home can expand its “quarantine wing.” Her daughter was told no one has tested positive for the coronavirus.

A family repeatedly asks if anyone has tested positive at the home of their grandfather only to receive cheerful texts that avoid the question and say: “We’re all doing great!”

Barred from visiting their relatives in the midst of a pandemic, people with relatives in nursing homes and assisted living facilities across the state say they are also being deprived of information that could reassure them that their loved ones are safe.

Quote :

Those early days of the epidemic illustrated the strengths and weaknesses of the W.H.O., an arm of the United Nations that is now under fire by President Trump, who on Tuesday ordered a cutoff of American funding to the organization.

With limited, constantly shifting information to go on, the W.H.O. showed an early, consistent determination to treat the new contagion like the threat it would become, and to persuade others to do the same. At the same time, the organization repeatedly praised China, acting and speaking with a political caution born of being an arm of the United Nations, with few resources of its own, unable to do its work without international cooperation.

Mr. Trump, deflecting criticism that his own handling of the crisis left the United States unprepared, accused the W.H.O. of mismanaging it, called the organization “very China-centric” and said it had “pushed China’s misinformation.”

But a close look at the record shows that the W.H.O. acted with greater foresight and speed than many national governments, and more than it had shown in previous epidemics. And while it made mistakes, there is little evidence that the W.H.O. is responsible for the disasters that have unfolded in Europe and then the United States.

Quote :

This is the first multi-center RCT investigating the use of hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19. 150 adult patients hospitalized with COVID-19 were randomized in an open-label, non-blinded fashion.

Hydroxychloroquine had no effect on the duration of viral detection (despite the use of high doses and a prolonged 2-3 week course).

Clinically, there was no discernible beneficial effect from hydroxychloroquine. However, hydroxychloroquine did appear to cause some side-effects (most notably diarrhea).

Further studies on hydroxychloroquine will likely be emerging soon. For now, the best available evidence does not support the use of hydroxychloroquine in COVID-19. Given evidence of harm without evidence of benefit, it seems prudent to restrict the use of hydroxychloroquine to randomized controlled studies for the time being.

Dr. Oz just made the argument that we should reopen schools because *only* 2-3% of kids will die.
pic.twitter.com/yKaHEybZqj

— Joshua Potash (@JoshuaPotash) April 16, 2020

Quote :

Demonstrators drove thousands of vehicles — many draped with protest signs — to Michigan's state Capitol on Wednesday, loudly protesting Gov. Gretchen Whitmer's stay-at-home order intended to fight the coronavirus pandemic.

Police watched as horns honked and commercial and private vehicles from around the state  jammed Capitol Avenue and other streets surrounding Michigan's seat of government.

"Liberty once lost is lost forever," read a sign draped across a commercial van. "Security without liberty is called prison," read another, stretched across the Capitol's front lawn. "Recall Whitmer," a third sign said.