Severe Outcomes Among U.S. Patients with Covid-19, Feb 12–Mar 16, 2020

A huge remaining unknown is how many people were infected but not tested, which would tend to reduce that 8.3% but perhaps not to a negligible level.

Out of 4226 cases

2449 have known ages

705 were 20 to 44

~488 of that age have a known age and hospitalization status

~101 of that age were hospitalized

~14 of that age went to ICU

(14.3% of the known # of cases for that age and 20.8% of the known # of cases for that age with a known hospitalization status were hospitalized)

Check this against Figure 2 in the CDC study and you will see where the StatNews article is pulling its data from.

This is very sobering information. Please stay safe!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroxychloroquine

I don't know how difficult scaling up production is, but the above numbers make me hopeful.

Sample size is only 36. 20 treated patients. 16 control.

1. the evidence-free claim of “full peer review”, 2. the fact that patients who refused or met “exclusion criteria” for the drug served as a portion of the control group, and were the only members of the control group from the same region as the experimental group, 3. the removal of people from the experiment group because they went to the ICU or died (only three of first and one of second, but a rather bizarre thing to happen before claiming 100% cure), 4. the lack of coverage from any major news source, despite this being reported about a day ago.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/marybethpfeiffer/2020/03/18/sci...

An old malaria and autoimmune drug is showing promise as a potential treatment for COVID-19 – although health officials are urging caution until clinical trials are done.

The drug, hydroxychloroquine, sold under the brand name Plaquenil, was reported March 9 in Clinical Infectious Diseases journal to be effective at killing the virus in laboratory experiments. In a letter in Cell Discovery Wednesday, the study’s authors, mainly from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Wuhan, wrote, “(W)e predict that the drug has a good potential to combat the disease.”

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/here-are-some-exi...

For coronaviruses chloroquine works by increasing endosomal pH and interfere with terminal glycosylation of the cellular receptor.[42][43] In late January 2020 during the 2019–20 coronavirus outbreak, Chinese medical researchers stated that exploratory research into chloroquine and two other medications, remdesivir and lopinavir/ritonavir, seemed to have "fairly good inhibitory effects" on the 2019 novel coronavirus. Requests to start clinical testing were submitted.[44][45][46] Chloroquine phosphate had been also proposed as a treatment for SARS-CoV with in vitro tests successfully inhibiting the virus.[47]

On 19 February 2020, preliminary results found that chloroquine may be effective and safe in treating COVID-19 associated pneumonia.[48][49] There is evidence to indicate the efficacy of chloroquine phosphate against SARS-CoV-2 in vitro, on Vero cells.[50] The Guangdong Provincial Department of Science and Technology and the Guangdong Provincial Health and Health Commission issued a report stating that chloroquine phosphate "improves the success rate of treatment and shortens the length of patient’s hospital stay" and recommended it for patients diagnosed with mild, moderate and severe cases of novel coronavirus pneumonia.[51]

Chloroquine have been recommended by Chinese, South Korean and Italian health authorities for the treatment of COVID-19 [52][53][54], however they have noted the important contraindications for people with certain heart conditions, diabetes, etc.[55][56] In February 2020, both drugs were shown to effectively inhibit COVID-19 in vitro [57], however a further study concluded that hydroxychloroquine was more potent than chloroquine, with a more tolerable safety profile. [58] Preliminary results from a multicentric trial, announced in a press conference suggested that chloroquine is effective and safe in treating COVID-19 associated pneumonia, "improving lung imaging findings, promoting a virus-negative conversion, and shortening the disease course".[59]

On 16 March 2020, advisor to the French Government on COVID-19, Professor Didier Raoult, announced that a trial involving 24 patients from the south east of France supported the claim that chloroquine was an effective treatment for COVID-19.[60] 600mg of hydroxychloroquine was administered to these patients every day for 10 days. The drug appeared to be responsible for a "rapid and effective speeding up of their healing process, and a sharp decrease in the amount of time they remained contagious".[61] The study also suggested that taking chloroquine in combination with the antibiotic azithromycin - which is known to be effective against complications from bacterial lung disease - led to even better outcomes. Professor Raoult said the results showed there was "a spectacular reduction in the number of positive cases" with the combination therapy.[62] At 6 days, among patients given combination therapy, the percentage of cases still carrying SRAS-CoV-2 was no more than 5%.[63]

Some threads on the internet say to stop taking ACE inhibitors because they boost ACE2, the gate that the virus uses to get into our cells. However, other threads on the internet says that while ACE inhibitors boost ACE2, they also cause them to be blocked (bound) by ATR-1, so you're good. Unless you stop, in which case now you have twice as many ACE2 and they're all unblocked.

So I'm listening to what the doctors say and not the internet.

It is. The quarantines/border-restrictions are not permanent measures, and acting swiftly is the correct way to nip it in the bud.

> Shutting down the country destroys everything.

Empty hyperbole. Death tolls in the tens of millions is a far worse outcome, as is stressing our current healthcare systems well beyond their capacities.

I'm not sure I want to be in their camp.

Even with all the generational resentment in the world, destroying the economy may be better than destroying lives.

But in the last few weeks I keep wondering if our reaction to covid-19 is consistent with our reactions to other causes of mortality. For example:

- 1.25 million people die in road crashes every year, yet we have collectively decided that abandoning cars is too large a sacrifice to make.

- global warming has the potential to cause huge devastations and millions of death, yet we fail to make the adequate sacrifices to limit our emissions.

So, is there something different about covid-19 that warrants these differences? Is the fatality rate higher, for example?

Or could it be a difference of game theory? For example for global warming, everybody has to participate in order to see gains.

Or maybe humans have a natural fear of germs and react stronger to contagious diseases than to other risks? I remember reading that argument in Factfulness.

If we can treat this as hitting the pause button on the economy, and find a way to fund it during this period, then we can press the play button and carry on where we left off. Of course that would require Russia, OPEC and the US to stop pumping oil. And a billion other details. But there's a lot of us, and we don't have much else to do.

This could be an economic disaster, but it doesn't need to be.

Sure, another alternative is we kill all the old people and all the doctors and nurses. Apparently some people aren't worried about the old people, but surely their self interest benefits from not killing all the doctors and nurses?

Kind of an "undefined behaviour" sort of thing - one branch of the conditional "cannot" happen, so you can assume it doesn't.