Tag Archives: Healthcare

Coronavirus dashboard for April 16: if new infections have passed peak, what pace of decline can we expect? Here is the update through yesterday (April 15). Significant new items are in italics In the US, the only significant development yesterday was that deaths rose to yet another new daily high, while infections continued to be below last week’s peak. Since I want to look ahead, now that lockdowns appear to have worked and the number of new daily...

(Dan here…simultaneous and probably related is the declining testing being done currently, and the federal lack of keeping track of nursing home and other long term care facilities deaths, as this group double downs on the “re-0pening” without precaution.) Washington Post reports: If all roads in Michigan lead to the state capitol, conservative protesters on Wednesday made sure they were closed. For miles, thousands of drivers clogged the streets to...

In the last two weeks of March and the first week of April, 2020 16.5 million new claims for unemployment were filed in the U.S. After the novel coronavirus is successfully contained some but not all of those jobs will return. The post-pandemic economy will not be the same as the economy before and to assume a return to business-as-usual economic growth would be folly. There will need to be immediate share-the-work policies along with basic income...

This is interesting. In addition to the two huge multi center phase III trials of Remdesivir for Covid 19 with estimated completion some time in May 2020, there is a smaller but very large trial in Beijing with estimated completion May 1 2020. The East is Remd ! May Day May Day May Day “Estimated Study Completion Date : May 1, 2020” Finally there is a very large trial in Hubei province with estimation completion date April 27 2020 “Estimated Study...

(Dan here..Robert leads with a disclaimer, but I respectfully disagree it does not belong here. So this is lifed from Robert’s Stochastic Thoughts). Experts and Me This is much too self indulgent for Angry Bear. I am trying to understand what I think of the recent discussion of leaving things up to the experts. Donald Trump is making a very convincing case for leaving things up to experts by pretending to be able to outguess them using his gut. I remain...

I am back complaining about the FDA as I have in The Ethics of Clinical Trials and 10 years earlier Clinical Trial Ethics (an aside — I had forgotten the old post and Google reminded me that I have been banging this drum for a decade). Now I have a lot of company, because of the pandemic. Many people (including the ex FDA director Gottlieb retweeted by a Senator Brian Schatz) argue that the extreme circumstances imply that delays that are normally...

This post is not up to the standards of the New England Journal of Medicine Compassionate Use of Remdesivir for Patients with Severe Covid-19 is an important article written and published with amazing speed. The (many) authors (including professional writers) assess the experience of 53 “patients who received remdesivir during the period from January 25, 2020, through March 7, 2020, and have clinical data for at least 1 subsequent day.” I think I’m just...

Abbreviated Coronavirus dashboard for April 12: fundamentally, still flying blind Here is the update through yesterday (April 11) This is an abbreviated version, covering just the essentials. Number and rate of increase of Reported Infections (from Johns Hopkins via arcgis.com) Number: up +28,391 to 530,006 (vs. 35,219 prior peak on April 10) Figure 1 ***Rate of increase: day/day: 6% (vs. 8% for the past week, and 8% on April 9) Yesterday marked the...

Why was the PREDICT Program Suspended Last Fall? A discussion from October 29, 2019: A crucial federal program tracking dangerous diseases is shutting down. Predict, a pandemic preparedness program, thrived under Bush and Obama. Now it’s canceled … Ever since the 2005 H5N1 bird flu scare, the US Agency for International Development (USAID) has run a project to track and research these diseases, called Predict. At a cost of $207 million during its...

Vua Econospeak, hat tip commenter Ken Melvin for this example from Crooks and Liars of a BBC anchor being straight forward: [embedded content]BBC News to American Brodcasting: How to Open a News Segment