The only reference to 40x I have seen is this one:
https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-boris-johnsons-government-reportedly-furious-with-china-2020-3
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A poll is not scientific data, and it’s not clear from this whether the doctors polled had actually treated COVId-19 patients or were just giving their impression (could be the former, just not sure from the article). I also find it interesting that only 7% of doctors in Japan had prescribed it, yet they have a lower fatality rate than many of those countries (despite having an older population). Obviously, their low case count is a big factor there, because they can provide adequate care to everyone who needs it, but to me there doesn’t seem to be strong evidence that it is having some blockbuster effect. If it was, you would see it in this country-wide data, especially if, say, most of doctors in a country like Spain had used it.
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Clearly a poll is not scientific data. Nobody is suggesting that it is. However scientific data takes many years to collect, analyze, and disseminate… so collecting opinions of real world providers of healthcare is certainly a worthwhile venture at this point…
Scientific data won’t take years with this. It will be a month or two if the studies are conducted reasonably well. They will rush results and halt the trial early if it’s clear that the intervention is having a strong effect.
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You have a lot more faith in the process than I do. Where was all this efficiency with the aids outbreak? Or in diabetes? Cancer? Or anything else. They’re still arguing about whether tight control is beneficial in diabetes.
Hell hundreds of years of research and scientific analysis can’t even agree what types of diets people should be eating or whether real butter or eggs are good or bad for you.
I think a better comparison is the Ebola outbreaks in West Africa and the Congo. These produced results much quicker, and Ebola case counts rose much more slowly than do COVID-19 case counts.
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Finding an effective treatment of an acute disease process is where our current medical model and the studies that will help guide the treatments is easily set up for. Finding a cure, or figuring out how best to treat something in the long term that requires behavior modification is where our medical model suffers. Since there are so many patients available to enroll and we are only looking for how best to treat acute cases, we will have an answer in months as TiaG has suggested IMHO
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Show me an example of that that’s ever happened and I’ll be far more likely to have faith in it.
Last corona virus outbreak, SARS blew through, killed a lot of people, then fizzled out. We can hope the same happens here… but how did the scientific process solve that problem?
that was 20 years ago and it killed a total of 300 people. There were not enough people to enroll in a clinical trial to see if anything is effective.
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In the SARS example you give, the outbreak in the US lasted from March 23 2003 through May 6th 2003. In that time they came up with these treatment guidelines:
There is no confirmed treatment that works for every person who has SARS. Antiviral medications and steroids are sometimes given to reduce lung swelling, but aren’t effective for everyone. Supplemental oxygen or a ventilator may be prescribed if necessary. In severe cases, blood plasma from someone who has already recovered from SARS may also be administered. However, there is not yet enough evidence to prove that these treatments are effective.
Had that virus been more transmittable and there were more cases we would have figured out better treatment options just through trial and error. This virus outbreak will be no different. Guidelines will start out vague and get better as more data comes in.
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So what I’m hearing you say is that they came up with no effective treatment guidelines, but what would he needed to do so effectively is trial and error.
How is that different than what I’m saying… that the scientific process takes forever, and we don’t have time for that, so try the chloroquine now…
300 cases in the US for the SARS outbreak, currently we are at 10,000 hospitalized patients in New York alone, that is the difference. A huge amount of data will be available on this virus. Unfortunately. It has nothing to do with the scientific process.
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you seem to be deliberately ignoring the Ebola case. Where they took a disease with a 30-80% mortality ratein a 3rd world country and found a highly-effective vaccine.
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They found a vaccine for Ebola? I haven’t been offered it
yes, they did. Pretty amazing. They offer it as a “ring” vaccination so if someone you know has been exposed, you get it, and magically you do not get Ebola. Also they offer it to healthcare providers likely to be exposed.
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Ok… so since this is the gold standard you’re highlighting—-
When was the Ebola outbreak? When did the vaccine become available? How many people have been vaccinated. How does that timeline and those numbers equate to our current scenario?
well, there were two, one in 2014 and another in that just ended. I don’t know when it became available but 236,000 people were vaccinated in the affected region in this outbreak in the Congo, I think starting in 2018, I saw a WHO press release on that. 28,000 people contracted Ebola in the 2014 outbreak. I think less than half of that in the current one, which was basically going on in a war zone where doctors were murdered, which is part of why it took so long to treat and contain this outbreak.
That’s tiny compared to the COVID-19 outbreak, which means we will have plenty of people from which to amass data.
I think the results of the trial came from Guinea during the first outbreak, but then the Ebola outbreak ended. The next time they had a reason to use it was the second one.
They also found some other medicines that were effective, like Zmapp, and a few others, that lowered mortality pretty well. I guess those would be second-line treatments if someone still got sick?
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When they produce that t1 diabetes cure that they’ve been promising was within 5 years for decades, ill start having more faith in the scientific process (pertaining to curing disease outbreaks). In the meanwhile I’ll tend to trust the boots on the ground.