Tired: Remdesivir Wired: Merimopodib Inspired: Both Merimopodib (of which I just read for the first time) is an inhibitor of an enzyme used to make Guanosine. Viruses need a lot of Guanosine (and other nucleosides) to reproduce, so it is an antiviral. It can be taken orally and there is a known safe dose. A preprint asserts that a combination of Remdesivir and Merimopodib completely blocks SARS-CoV-2 replication in vitro. Here is the abstract The IMPDH...
Read More »If you open it, they still won’t come: restaurant edition
If you open it, they still won’t come: restaurant edition In case you haven’t already seen it, here is the OpenTable restaurant reservation data from 3 Confederate States that “reopened” their economy at the end of April: Even though restaurants were open again, reservations were still down over 80% from a year ago. This highlights an important behavioral aspect of the pandemic: people did not wait for their State governments to order lockdowns in...
Read More »How Likely Is A Second Wave Of SARS-CoV-2?
How Likely Is A Second Wave Of SARS-CoV-2? Dr. Anthony Fauci has testified before a Senate committee that he is worried that there may be a serious “Second Wave” of the current SARS-CoV-2 pandemic in the United States. The basis for this fear is the experience over a century ago with the Spanish flu, still deadlier than the current pandemic. It came in three full waves, and of those the second was easily substantially larger than the other two. The...
Read More »Testing and the 52 Petri dishes of democracy
Testing and the 52 Petri dishes of democracy Since the federal government has abandoned the field, fighting the coronavirus pandemic has been left to the States, territories, and the District of Columbia. This means that there is no unified response and instead there are 52+ individual responses. That is the biggest challenge in tracking the pandemic. Which means I’ve been looking for the best resources to show how the States are doing in comparison...
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Read More »What to do About The Schools
by Ken Melvin What to do About The Schools There needs to be a plan in place that deals with: grade levels, Covid Virus testing, schedules, classroom size, in-school traffic flow patterns, staffing, transportation, … The how and when are tied together. And yes, all these are interconnected. How to safely get 3,000 high school students to and from school; from class to class; to, into and out of classrooms; to, into and out of the cafeteria; … ...
Read More »Fauci: No scientific evidence the coronavirus was made in a Chinese lab
National Geographic published this. This seems to be an unusual topic for that publication and I wonder why Fauci selected it. Fauci: No scientific evidence the coronavirus was made in a Chinese lab The rest is copied exactly from National Geographic Fauci, the director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, shot down the discussion that has been raging among politicians and pundits, calling it “a circular argument” in a...
Read More »Plight of Indians During Epidemic and Who is Helping
About a month ago I wrote on the COVID 19 plight of the Navajo Indians in New Mexico, Arizona and Utah. New Mexico Governor Lujan Grisham requested military field hospitals to be set up to handle the fast moving virus. Trumps comment was, “Wow, that’s something.” The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and Federal Emergency Management Agency together constructed three reservation field hospitals to be used as alternative care sites according to the tribe earlier...
Read More »The humans always observe back: why I am rooting for NY to “crush the curve”
The humans always observe back: why I am rooting for NY to “crush the curve” So, in addition to a bunch of States in the Confederacy and a few in the high plains deciding that May 1 was the Day of Virus Jubilee, yesterday saw further discouraging news that not one but two epidemiological models drastically increased their estimates of deaths, while there was another revelation that Trump and the White House were relying on a “cubic” model devised by Kevin...
Read More »Elementary Statistics Review — Hypothesis Testing
I don’t know what to do about the widespread complete ignorance about the concepts of null hypothesis, rejection, failure to reject, p-levels. I will rant after the jump A glossary is urgently needed. 1. Size — the size of the test is the probability that a true null hypothesis will be rejected. For purely historical reasons the size 0.05 is often discussed. This is basically because the smallest 95% interval of a normal is roughly an even 4 standard...
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