People love to hate on anecdotes, but they have their place.
I'd argue that this certainly is a data point. Just not a very useful one.
If you happen to test a new cancer drug on a case like that, you'd walk away thinking you had something when the drug really did nothing.
For something like Covid where the impact can range from nothing to death, a single case doesn't really tell you much about a treatment.
Let’s at least wait through the weekend before we declare him “cured”.
I kinda am losing all faith in all things medicine if we've had experience, as a whole, to try to treat 36 MILLION people with this issue and one specific treatment for one specific person, who happens to survive like 35 MILLION others so far. And THATS the winning combo, And it happens to be our president. It's like the other 35 MILLION was just junk data or something.
Doctors will do their job and scientists will do their job, and in the end decisions will be made based on the results of studies.
That doesn't negate the enormous amount of positive press that this event will give to the treatment.
Either way, it should be a signal that we are getting much better at treating the illness. Back in April, Boris Johnson, who is basically a Trump equivalent, but 20 years younger, spent a week in the hospital in very rough shape.
The news on Cornavirus is in trending significantly in the positive direction, which is really all that matters.
Positive in terms of increasing case numbers, yes.
As the number of people I know who have caught it grows, I have to say I don't really see that as a negative thing.
Most of the new cases are in the young-adult demographic.
Almost universally they suffer no long term complications and the most unpleasant part of the sickness is being confined to their home for a week and a half.
Number of confirmed cases is the wrong metric.
We know very well by now who is at elevated risk.
If you are not in the elevated risk category, and you are able to avoid those who are at elevated risk, then there is very little for you to worry about.
Citation please.
As a relatively young person suffering from the long-term consequences of this disease, I am infuriated whenever anyone says something so false.
Citation please.
Is it actually false? Your one case does not a fact make. What percentage of confirmed cases in people under the age of, say, 40, result in long term complications?
Edit: Corrected punctuation and replaced "statistical fact" with just "fact".
That is positive press.
https://www.who.int/publications/m/item/draft-landscape-of-c...
There are thousands and thousands of people in the biomedical field all around the world working furiously behind the scenes at the moment on this problem.
Unfortunately, there is no single mouthpiece for this effort so people aren't aware of how many people are pulling out the stops, but despite how bleak things may look there are a lot of MDs and PhDs and MD/PhDs trucking away trying to find a way out of this thing.
It's important to keep in mind the difference between clinical and basic lab research.
Basic lab research is done in a sort of a closed system. There's a small group of people (grad students, post-docs) working on a limited set of projects. They all have their individual lab notebooks that are property of the lab. Nobody has to disclose anything to anybody, except the IRB and whoever is handing out grant money. The head of the lab, well their entire career depends on what that...lab...does... There is no plan B, other than teaching at a liberal-arts school or community college.
Most clinical researchers aren't as against-the-ropes in terms of their career as PhDs, because they're doctors and they can just go do medicine. Wups, my clinical study didn't work out, guess I'll go be absolutely.........fine..........
Plus, it's harder to keep things secret in a hospital. There's a lot more variables, and it's not as closed a system as a lab.
So for the COVID stuff, you have both MDs/DOs and PhDs working alongside each other in multidisciplinary teams. Thus, information is not as readily concealable and so there's less paranoia because....well, what's the point?
Obviously, it's still unclear how the politics of all of it play out, but seems more promising than most things we've seen so far.
Things he asserts as truth, generally aren’t.
It's hard, but less hard than some things. And we've been working on them for the last ~35 years.
Here's a primer if you're curious: https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/04/27/mo...
They're not trivial to make, but it's an understood process.
That said, there's been a lot of research and money to get us to where we are today. So how to value that? I've no idea.
Still looks promising though.