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Originally posted by smithnsig:
Well, just found out a high school football teammate of mine is in ICU with Covid.

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Originally posted by Largefarva:
It’s really unfortunate that we can’t trust a single thing out of China anymore. Hopefully people’s eyes open because of this shit storm and we remember that China can’t be trusted for anything. They could have prevented this whole pandemic had they just not been a bunch of shitbags and told the truth instead of covering it up.

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Originally posted by kkina:
I'm ok when the Pres calls it the Chinese Virus. It kind of fits, as an hour after you recover you're reinfected.

(I can get away with that one, being half Chinese! )

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Originally posted by Ryanp225:
I see everyone has accepted the name covid like the Chinese propaganda wants us to do.

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Originally posted by Skins2881:

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Originally posted by 46and2:
We need more banjo.

I wouldn't object.

I did realize that wat that Steve Martin. If he had an eye patch on, I would have instantly recognized him.

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Originally posted by wcb6092:

"...Pharmacists have been managing shortages for 20 years now," Ganio noted. "We've become creative, we've been able to manage most things where frontline practitioners don't realize that there is a shortage."

"We'll figure it out," he said.

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Originally posted by Oz_Shadow:

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Originally posted by Oat_Action_Man:

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Originally posted by Oz_Shadow:
Something else sad to see - many hospital administrations are are not supporting their nurses, aides, techs, etc. Even though there is a shortage, it is turning into you do what we tell you, when we tell you, how we tell you and do not complain even privately or you are fired.

Based on what I have heard directly from my live-in nurse, that is exactly the case, to the letter.

There has been a specific directive to personnel NOT to talk to anyone about the situation in the hospital.

Say nothing about equipment shortages or gross violations of previously standing policies, shifts in policies sometimes more than one time in a single shift, etc.

Based on my network, I would say I hear reliable info from 3 hospitals in this area, and it's all largely in agreement.

I suspect many new unions will be formed after this settles and the hospitals will not like the contracts.

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Originally posted by SIG228:

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Originally posted by smithnsig:
Well, just found out a high school football teammate of mine is in ICU with Covid.

How old is he?

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Originally posted by maladat:

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Originally posted by Jimineer:
I think they belong to big pharma.
Why use existing and proven drugs when we can spend billions investing in research using our money.

Rule number 1: follow the money. Right?

WHAT existing and proven drugs? There aren't any.

Based on reporting, virtually all of the pharmacological research being done right now is either (a) trying to establish whether any existing drugs are safe and effective treatments or (b) trying to develop a vaccine.

The benefits of a vaccine are obvious, but equally obviously, this is a new virus and we don't have one yet.

As far as drugs for treating active infections go, we have a whole lot of drugs for fighting bacterial infections, and they tend to be fairly broad spectrum (i.e., one drug works across a lot of different bacteria). We have relatively few antiviral drugs, and they are MUCH more specific.

Scientists all over the world are testing every existing drug anyone has any credible reason to think might possibly be effective.

That includes several drugs that showed promising early results in treating MERS and the 2003 SARS, which are similar coronaviruses (this includes hydrochloroquinone and several antivirals). But SARS and MERS were stopped very early (SARS: ~8000 confirmed cases, MERS: ~2500 confirmed cases) and the efficacy of those drugs was never fully established.

Early results on some of those drugs are promising. A number of them are effective at stopping viral reproduction in petri dishes, and some of those have some promising initial results in human testing, and are now undergoing more thorough trials to PROVE they are actually effective treatments for infected people.

That is being done at an INCREDIBLY accelerated pace compared to the usual process for testing new uses of drugs.

There are plenty of people calling for that testing to be skipped and just to start handing out the drugs. The problem with that is that the drugs can have significant side effects, might have some unknown, unpredicted negative interaction with COVID-19 infections, and might not be as effective as the informal testing done so far suggests. In short, it's POSSIBLE that just giving those drugs to everyone who is infected could actually make things worse overall than not giving them, and we want to be reasonably sure that's not the case before we start giving them to tons of people.

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Originally posted by BansheeOne:
Bad news: Not only has the share of critical cases now risen to 5.9 percent (ca. 3,400 out of 58,000), but we got nearly 6,200 newly established infections yesterday again after the sub-5,000 numbers of previous days - though still on a generally downward trend from the peak of 6,900. Good news: The German Hospital Society estimates that number of ICU beds has now increased from 28,000 to nearly 40,000 nationally, three quarters of which equipped with ventilators by reactivating old devices, procuring new ones, and repurposing some from post-OP recovery rooms etc. Free bed capacity thus still 15-20,000. By now we're starting to take in patients from the Netherlands, which also seem to run into capacity limits; their policy has been similar to the UK's, first letting it run before turning about and also imposing restrictions.

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