The Office for National Statistics has collated deaths on a weekly basis in the UK since 2005. In the week ending 3rd April there were over 6,000 more deaths than expected (140% of the average for this week). That makes it easily the worst week for deaths since this data started being collected.
3,500 of those deaths are attributable to Covid-19. That includes deaths in the community where the death certificate refers to the likelihood that Covid-19 was present (whether or not a test was carried out). However, that still leaves a significant unexplained increase over the average and it's important that an explanation is found.
It seems likely that part of the difference is due to under-reporting of Covid-19 in the absence of test data, but it's not clear whether that accounts for the bulk of the difference. It's possible there are also significant numbers of additional deaths as a result of the current lockdown. There are various factors that could explain that, e.g.
- people not calling the emergency services as quickly as they should do, either due to not wanting to bother them or fear of infection (separate data confirms that A&E services have been much less busy than expected recently).
- there is a government list of particularly vulnerable people and arrangements to support those, but it's likely there are at least a few who have fallen through cracks in this new system and may not be getting required support such as medicines delivery.
- the requirements for social distancing may have an impact on both mental and physical health.
I don't think there was an option to introducing severe restrictions due to the sheer scale of the potential deaths from Covid-19, but it's important that we get a better understanding of the wider impacts of those restrictions as soon as possible to help plan for the best possible outcome. At present there's no guarantee there will ever be an effective treatment for the disease, but even if there is that's likely to be quite a few months away, leaving social distancing as the only real way to protect against the disease for some time. Balancing the benefits and harms from that in the longer term means we need to be studying the impacts of social distancing as well as the impacts from Covid-19.
A common refrain here in the US is that the economic hardship will cause as many deaths as the virus. There is no evidence of this. In fact, it's the opposite. There was no spike in mortality rates in 2008-2009. It actually went DOWN in the Great Depression. It's a cure phrase and nothing more.
It's not just economic hardship though, it's the wider impacts of social distancing. For instance, although I haven't seen specific figures, there have been references to suicide helplines being much busier in the US - and there are lots of less direct potential methods to increase the chance of death (like lack of people to help with accidents, poor nutrition, lack of exercise, more unwillingness than usual to call an ambulance etc).
New York has now changed their method of accounting for deaths to include a separate category for people whose death was probably the result of Covid-19. That will add another 3,778 people to the Covid-19 count since March 11 (though those have not yet been added into national statistics). However, there are another 3,000+ people who have died in the past month in New York over and above the expected average. As with the UK, it's important to understand what is driving these deaths. Unless you have some evidence of the cause of these, I think it's dangerous to assume these are the result of the disease, as opposed to the measures being taken to contain it.
I think it's almost certain there will be a balancing point where the cure does become more harmful than the disease, even if you take only the very narrow definition of deaths as your parameter. My earlier point was that, in order to better understand where that balancing point might be, it's necessary to understand what's driving the high current death rates.
I don't think it's safe to assume ALL of the unexplained excess deaths are caused by the virus, but I think it's certainly safe to assume that MOST of them are. For instance, I'm willing to bet alot of deaths that are officially being labeled as "pneumonia" or "heart attack" are, in fact, the result of COVID-19 CAUSING one of those two things to take place. So I and no one else has hard numbers, but I'd wager rather heavily that upwards of 75% of these discrepancies to past years are directly related to complications from the virus. Two weeks of eating Hungry Man dinners and not taking a walk isn't causing a massive death spike. And a suicide is going to be fairly easy to ascertain as just that. And all this does is focus on the criminal lack of testing in the US. We have no idea how many people actually have the virus. People who have the virus don't even necessarily know they have the virus. You could be fine on Tuesday and dead in your recliner on Friday afternoon.
As you say, the data is not clear at the moment and you may be right - but you may well not be as well . One thing that is clear from the progression of the disease so far is that your chance of dying is far higher if you are already vulnerable for other reasons. Another thing that is clear is that the mortality risk by age from Covid-19 tracks very closely with the standard annual mortality risk. That doesn't mean that the same people who would die within a year anyway are the only victims, but there will certainly be a significant overlap.
I would be surprised if there's not also a overlap in relation to the currently unexplained deaths for reasons other than the disease itself, i.e. people who would have died anyway over the coming weeks and months are tipped over the edge as a result of lack of care. I don't think it's far-fetched at all to suggest that many already vulnerable people will die as a result of things like lack of exercise (if you've never tried doing no exercise for several weeks, give it a go - it makes a huge difference to your body even if you start off as a healthy person), poor nutrition, not taking medicines and lack of medical help.
In the UK we're currently seeing high death rates in care homes for the elderly. Much of that is undoubtedly due to Covid-19 infections, but that doesn't appear to be the only cause. In too many cases standards of care have slipped as a result of staff shortages and staff fears about going to work - and those same sorts of factors will also apply to some vulnerable people in the community more generally.
If we're strictly talking about health care for other ailments suffering, then I believe that can also be laid directly at the feet of the virus. You can't NOT treat people with COVID-19 symptoms (although triage has happened in some instances). And the staff (at least in anecdotal instances in the US I have read about) aren't going to work because the nursing facility they work for isn't giving them the protective equipment they need to safely do their job. Stories of "one mask per week, take care of it it's all you get" are all over the place. And nursing homes are rife with abuse and negligence in the best of times. See this horror show from New Jersey:
In Colorado the Curve is flattening. Officials are still warning us to continue with social distancing, masks, and stay at home. It's too soon for celebrations, but it is good news.
There have been a number of straws in the wind recently pointing towards the potential difficulties with getting back to normal. Those include:
- as a number of European countries are at or close to the point of relaxing restrictions, Germany has had 4 days in a row of successive increases in the number of infections (though the numbers are still relatively small - around 4,000 yesterday).
- some patients have apparently been turned away from hospitals in Japan. The numbers of cases there have been pretty low, so this suggests some pretty major flaws in the preparations made for the disease.
- the UK purchased option rights to 3.5m antibody tests for the disease some time ago and has been testing various possibilities in an attempt to find a suitable one. If a reliable test could be found that would greatly help in getting people back to work, but thus far no test has proved suitable.
- the WHO have said there is limited evidence that the presence of antibodies will give immunity to Covid-19, which further undermines the idea of antibody tests.
- concerns over how whether the disease is getting established in some crowded urban areas in Africa and India. The known cases are still relatively low, but given the limited availability of testing the numbers could mushroom out of control very quickly in crowded conditions.
I'll respond to it here because this is where it's posted. These people get attention because they're obnoxious assholes, but also because the national media treats them showing up in public like some sort of anthropological study. I mean, they could just ASK some of us who have lived in rural areas much of our lives what these people are like and we could tell them. It's a geek show. The only thing missing is the human torso guy.
That said, even if percentage-wise their numbers are miniscule, it only takes one of them to infect god knows how many others, and then it's off to the races. The chances no one spread the virus at any of these rallies over the weekend is exactly 0%. Wisconsin is already seeing an uptick that is CLEARLY connected to the election that went forward
Doctors are reporting that a mysterious blood-clotting complication is killing their coronavirus patients. Despite being treated with blood-thinners, which help break down the clots, patients are still developing them in various parts of the body. More and more, physicians are finding that covid-19 is much more than just a respiratory illness. Here's what we know, and why doctors are so concerned.
Doctors are reporting that a mysterious blood-clotting complication is killing their coronavirus patients. Despite being treated with blood-thinners, which help break down the clots, patients are still developing them in various parts of the body. More and more, physicians are finding that covid-19 is much more than just a respiratory illness. Here's what we know, and why doctors are so concerned.
There's far more to it than just the blood clots too. Here's an article from Science magazine that's very enlightening if you don't mind reading a more scientific perspective...
Doctors are reporting that a mysterious blood-clotting complication is killing their coronavirus patients. Despite being treated with blood-thinners, which help break down the clots, patients are still developing them in various parts of the body. More and more, physicians are finding that covid-19 is much more than just a respiratory illness. Here's what we know, and why doctors are so concerned.
There's far more to it than just the blood clots too. Here's an article from Science magazine that's very enlightening if you don't mind reading a more scientific perspective...
Aside from everything else, if this virus WAS to hit you hard enough to kill you, it sounds like an absolutely horrible death, that you are forced to face almost entirely alone.
Doctors are reporting that a mysterious blood-clotting complication is killing their coronavirus patients. Despite being treated with blood-thinners, which help break down the clots, patients are still developing them in various parts of the body. More and more, physicians are finding that covid-19 is much more than just a respiratory illness. Here's what we know, and why doctors are so concerned.
There's far more to it than just the blood clots too. Here's an article from Science magazine that's very enlightening if you don't mind reading a more scientific perspective...
Aside from everything else, if this virus WAS to hit you hard enough to kill you, it sounds like an absolutely horrible death, that you are forced to face almost entirely alone.
I know it's small consolation, but the odds are in your favor even if you get it. I think I said this many pages ago but everybody is going to get this eventually unless they come up with a safe, working vaccine in the next year or two.
Not many people can stay in their house for years and social distancing is far from 100% effective. Darth Vader would probably be safe, but barring that level of protection, you're at risk every time you step out of your door.
Oh the irony. After years of telling of the dangers of smoking and previously telling people that smoking was a risk factor linked to coronavirus infection, researchers in France discovered some interesting domestic statistics and now French researchers to test nicotine patches on coronavirus patients (the Guardian UK newspaper via yahoo UK).
Oh the irony. After years of telling of the dangers of smoking and previously telling people that smoking was a risk factor linked to coronavirus infection, researchers in France discovered some interesting domestic statistics and now French researchers to test nicotine patches on coronavirus patients (the Guardian UK newspaper via yahoo UK).
TR
Interesting. On another note, it appears asthma isn't as much of a factor as was initially feared (or even COPD for that matter).
There are lots of larger-scale trials going on, so these results are not conclusive. However, it does seem a bit unlikely now that any benefits gained will outweigh the significant dangerous side-effects from using the drugs. It's certainly very unlikely that these drugs will be a 'game-changer', which puts even more emphasis on the search for a vaccine. Human trials have just begun in the UK and there are a number of other groups around the world at or ahead of that stage. The most optimistic projections suggest there could be meaningful amounts of a vaccine available in the Autumn, but most scientists still think that timescale is much too optimistic.
Trump's apparent belief in the curative powers of UV light or injections of disinfectant into Covid-19 sufferers are ludicrous. However, the briefing where he made those remarks did cover a substantive issue - i.e. research suggesting that Covid-19 is weakened by exposure to sunlight and heat.
That suggestion chimes with observations of the impact of the disease across the world. Australia as a country was slow to adopt social distancing and, judging by European standards, I would have expected a severe epidemic there. However, it's actually escaped very lightly so far. South Africa as a country has prepared much more thoroughly for the disease than most African countries, but doctors there have been surprised that the expected level of cases has not materialized. In fact that seems to be the general experience in Africa and India to date. The disease could of course still really take off in particularly suitable conditions (like the crowded conditions for foreign workers that have dented Singapore's relative success in keeping infections under control), but it does appear to be less virulent than in currently colder parts of the world.
Sneezing appears more in cold environments so it likely spreads easier. Doesn't mean the virus cannot survive in hot countries.
Also, a lot of western people are idiots and ignore lockdowns or haven't done it yet while population discipline seems (in some cases enforced) much higher in non western countries.
Sneezing appears more in cold environments so it likely spreads easier. Doesn't mean the virus cannot survive in hot countries.
Also, a lot of western people are idiots and ignore lockdowns or haven't done it yet while population discipline seems (in some cases enforced) much higher in non western countries.
There was plenty of evidence of poor lockdown discipline in Australia - even after they eventually proclaimed one. I accept there's no question the virus can survive in hotter countries, all I'm saying is that a review of worldwide statistics about the spread of the disease is consistent with the US research findings that hot conditions weaken it.
Yeah, heat and sunlight alone are not enough to blunt a COVID-19 infection. For example, you might have heard that cases here in Singapore have exploded (from below 2000 cases to 11,000 and rising in just the span of a week) due to undiscovered transmissions among migrant workers (many of whom work here in Singapore in the construction industry). As a tropical country, Singapore has no shortage of heat and sunlight, but the disease nonetheless spread like wildfire among the workers because nearly all of them live together in cramped dormitories that are the perfect breeding ground for respiratory viruses like COVID-19.
Ok, it's official: from May 4th, in Italy we will start the Phase Two.
May 4th
You can:
Come back home if you were in a different place when the quarantine started
Do individual physical activities outdoor
Meet your parents if they live in a different house from yours
Celebrate and attend funerals (up to 15 people)
Go to work
Bar and restaurants can open only to offer take away and delivery services.
May 18th
Stores can reopen
Museums and exhibitions can reopen
Team sports should be possible again
June 1st
Bar, restaurants and hairdressers can fully reopen.
Masks are a must have when you go outside. Also, you cannot leave your region (for instance, I cannot leave Lombardy).
The plan makes sense to me - they decided to put 14 days between each group of permissions in order to monitor the effects.
If something goes wrong, we will go back to full quarantine.
I do hope that people will follow the rules and be careful when outside - numbers decreased significantly in all Italy, with the exception of Milan. So if we keep following them, we can enjoy pieces of everyday life outside our home.
Tomorrow the US will hit a million cases. By Tuesday 60,000 will be dead, with nothing close to a respite in site. Average new cases a day are still easily meeting or exceeding 30,000, and this plateau has been consistent for at least 3 weeks. There are only true downward trends in places where the most extreme social distancing measures have taken place. Much of the rest of the country has, as someone so aptly put it, cut their parachute off when they are only halfway to the ground. Our leadership, to put it mildly, has at best abdicated all responsibility, and at worst actively made the situation far, far worse than it should have been. An impatient, ignorant and coddled citizenry is also very much to blame. Immune to much of the world's problems by way of wealth and geography, COVID-19 landing on our shores was basically like the Red Death getting in Prince Prospero's castle.
Wow!!! Where are you @jjstraka34? We're not experiencing anything that bad here in Colorado. I mean, we have new cases but the numbers are coming down. I hope it turns around for you.
EDIT: Of course I'm speaking locally, while jj is speaking nationally. My point is that except for a few areas, and California, "quarantine" efforts are being largely observed and effective. It is still early yet, and I worry that some may be reopening prematurely.
Sneezing appears more in cold environments so it likely spreads easier. Doesn't mean the virus cannot survive in hot countries.
Also, a lot of western people are idiots and ignore lockdowns or haven't done it yet while population discipline seems (in some cases enforced) much higher in non western countries.
There was plenty of evidence of poor lockdown discipline in Australia - even after they eventually proclaimed one. I accept there's no question the virus can survive in hotter countries, all I'm saying is that a review of worldwide statistics about the spread of the disease is consistent with the US research findings that hot conditions weaken it.
I'm skeptical of this point. I think it's super premature to draw any conclusions about the characteristics of the virus based on data so far. People should recognize that we're actually still in the early stages of the pandemic. There's plenty of ways to look at the data anecdotally that belie the warmth hypothesis -- southern Europe doing worse than northern Europe, for example.
Not to mention that there's a serious complication in how to count deaths, whether they're being reported accurately. Tropical countries tend to be poorer and have weaker counting measures period, so, again, I think it's way too early to draw conclusions here. We certainly have strong anecdotal evidence that the virus is capable of spreading at pandemic levels in tropical climes: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/22/ecuador-guayaquil-mayor- But as that article notes, Ecuador also is likely doing a poor job of reporting its coronavirus total, at least currently.
This goes for stories about miracle cures or treatments as well. Just as with any crisis where there's a lot of breaking news, there's a lot of "facts" that get thrown around early on that ends up being wrong.
It appears that a lot more people might be dead from covid-19 than has been counted. I realize this is intuitively apparent and many have said this already, but here are some statistics to back it up.
It appears that a lot more people might be dead from covid-19 than has been counted. I realize this is intuitively apparent and many have said this already, but here are some statistics to back it up.
Yeah as early as mid-March I was seeing some speculation that under-reporting (unintentional and intentional) was widespread, but as time goes on there seems to be more and more evidence stacking up to move that out of the realm of speculation.
The FDA have issued emergency authorization for remdesivir - an antiviral drug used against Ebola. That's presumably been done in the light of the recent study run by NIAID involving 1,063 people. That found that the average length of symptoms was cut from 15 to 11 days.
This is certainly a hopeful development and, with luck, good results will be obtained from a number of other trials still ongoing. However, the NIAID trial results have not yet been published, so it's not yet possible to assess the real benefit to be expected even purely on the basis of this trial. If, for instance, the drug shortened the duration of mild symptoms, but had no impact on more severe cases that result in death, it would be of limited value.
Scientists are currently beginning a trial of the plasma/antibody treatment, mentioned earlier in this thread, here in the UK. They have enough volunteers for giving blood. Now they just need people ill with the disease but well enough to give informed consent. Since such treatment has been successfully used previously on different viruses (flu, ebola and a number of other diseases), this also looks promising.
The FDA have issued emergency authorization for remdesivir - an antiviral drug used against Ebola. That's presumably been done in the light of the recent study run by NIAID involving 1,063 people. That found that the average length of symptoms was cut from 15 to 11 days.
This is certainly a hopeful development and, with luck, good results will be obtained from a number of other trials still ongoing. However, the NIAID trial results have not yet been published, so it's not yet possible to assess the real benefit to be expected even purely on the basis of this trial. If, for instance, the drug shortened the duration of mild symptoms, but had no impact on more severe cases that result in death, it would be of limited value.
Yes. While the results of several trials have indeed shown a positive effect of remdesivir, it should be noted that it is not a "cure" for COVID-19. All we know so far is that it seems to speed up recovery times by a third; we don't know yet whether it proves effective across the board, and whether or not it has measurable benefits for people in severe distress (that is, people who would have died if not given the drug, versus people who would have recovered anyway if they hadn't taken remdesivir, and it just sped up their recovery time).
Nevertheless, the fact that we do now have a drug that speeds recovery WILL be of benefit via the fact that it will free up hospital beds faster and help ease pressure on healthcare workers by eliminating caseloads at a quicker rate.
The FDA have issued emergency authorization for remdesivir - an antiviral drug used against Ebola. That's presumably been done in the light of the recent study run by NIAID involving 1,063 people. That found that the average length of symptoms was cut from 15 to 11 days.
This is certainly a hopeful development and, with luck, good results will be obtained from a number of other trials still ongoing. However, the NIAID trial results have not yet been published, so it's not yet possible to assess the real benefit to be expected even purely on the basis of this trial. If, for instance, the drug shortened the duration of mild symptoms, but had no impact on more severe cases that result in death, it would be of limited value.
Yes. While the results of several trials have indeed shown a positive effect of remdesivir, it should be noted that it is not a "cure" for COVID-19. All we know so far is that it seems to speed up recovery times by a third; we don't know yet whether it proves effective across the board, and whether or not it has measurable benefits for people in severe distress (that is, people who would have died if not given the drug, versus people who would have recovered anyway if they hadn't taken remdesivir, and it just sped up their recovery time).
Nevertheless, the fact that we do now have a drug that speeds recovery WILL be of benefit via the fact that it will free up hospital beds faster and help ease pressure on healthcare workers by eliminating caseloads at a quicker rate.
Looking at the NIAID press release about the trial it does in fact refer to an improvement in mortality as well as a reduction in recovery time. Given that the former hasn't been emphasized in briefings I suspect it wasn't statistically significant, but that's still another positive sign.
Comments
If we're strictly talking about health care for other ailments suffering, then I believe that can also be laid directly at the feet of the virus. You can't NOT treat people with COVID-19 symptoms (although triage has happened in some instances). And the staff (at least in anecdotal instances in the US I have read about) aren't going to work because the nursing facility they work for isn't giving them the protective equipment they need to safely do their job. Stories of "one mask per week, take care of it it's all you get" are all over the place. And nursing homes are rife with abuse and negligence in the best of times. See this horror show from New Jersey:
Hopefully the trend will keep slowing down.
- as a number of European countries are at or close to the point of relaxing restrictions, Germany has had 4 days in a row of successive increases in the number of infections (though the numbers are still relatively small - around 4,000 yesterday).
- some patients have apparently been turned away from hospitals in Japan. The numbers of cases there have been pretty low, so this suggests some pretty major flaws in the preparations made for the disease.
- the UK purchased option rights to 3.5m antibody tests for the disease some time ago and has been testing various possibilities in an attempt to find a suitable one. If a reliable test could be found that would greatly help in getting people back to work, but thus far no test has proved suitable.
- the WHO have said there is limited evidence that the presence of antibodies will give immunity to Covid-19, which further undermines the idea of antibody tests.
- concerns over how whether the disease is getting established in some crowded urban areas in Africa and India. The known cases are still relatively low, but given the limited availability of testing the numbers could mushroom out of control very quickly in crowded conditions.
https://www.freep.com/story/sports/columnists/mitch-albom/2020/04/19/mitch-albom-michigan-capitol-protests/5159235002/
I'll respond to it here because this is where it's posted. These people get attention because they're obnoxious assholes, but also because the national media treats them showing up in public like some sort of anthropological study. I mean, they could just ASK some of us who have lived in rural areas much of our lives what these people are like and we could tell them. It's a geek show. The only thing missing is the human torso guy.
That said, even if percentage-wise their numbers are miniscule, it only takes one of them to infect god knows how many others, and then it's off to the races. The chances no one spread the virus at any of these rallies over the weekend is exactly 0%. Wisconsin is already seeing an uptick that is CLEARLY connected to the election that went forward
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/04/22/coronavirus-blood-clots/?cv-campaign=4fda08e2fbca0387b958bb44bf5cc2b6
There's far more to it than just the blood clots too. Here's an article from Science magazine that's very enlightening if you don't mind reading a more scientific perspective...
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/04/how-does-coronavirus-kill-clinicians-trace-ferocious-rampage-through-body-brain-toes#
Aside from everything else, if this virus WAS to hit you hard enough to kill you, it sounds like an absolutely horrible death, that you are forced to face almost entirely alone.
I know it's small consolation, but the odds are in your favor even if you get it. I think I said this many pages ago but everybody is going to get this eventually unless they come up with a safe, working vaccine in the next year or two.
Not many people can stay in their house for years and social distancing is far from 100% effective. Darth Vader would probably be safe, but barring that level of protection, you're at risk every time you step out of your door.
TR
https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20200420/asthma-may-not-be-a-major-risk-factor-for-covid-19
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/23/elizabeth-warren-brother-dies-from-coronavirus-203803
There are lots of larger-scale trials going on, so these results are not conclusive. However, it does seem a bit unlikely now that any benefits gained will outweigh the significant dangerous side-effects from using the drugs. It's certainly very unlikely that these drugs will be a 'game-changer', which puts even more emphasis on the search for a vaccine. Human trials have just begun in the UK and there are a number of other groups around the world at or ahead of that stage. The most optimistic projections suggest there could be meaningful amounts of a vaccine available in the Autumn, but most scientists still think that timescale is much too optimistic.
That suggestion chimes with observations of the impact of the disease across the world. Australia as a country was slow to adopt social distancing and, judging by European standards, I would have expected a severe epidemic there. However, it's actually escaped very lightly so far. South Africa as a country has prepared much more thoroughly for the disease than most African countries, but doctors there have been surprised that the expected level of cases has not materialized. In fact that seems to be the general experience in Africa and India to date. The disease could of course still really take off in particularly suitable conditions (like the crowded conditions for foreign workers that have dented Singapore's relative success in keeping infections under control), but it does appear to be less virulent than in currently colder parts of the world.
Also, a lot of western people are idiots and ignore lockdowns or haven't done it yet while population discipline seems (in some cases enforced) much higher in non western countries.
There was plenty of evidence of poor lockdown discipline in Australia - even after they eventually proclaimed one. I accept there's no question the virus can survive in hotter countries, all I'm saying is that a review of worldwide statistics about the spread of the disease is consistent with the US research findings that hot conditions weaken it.
May 4th
You can:
Bar and restaurants can open only to offer take away and delivery services.
May 18th
June 1st
Masks are a must have when you go outside. Also, you cannot leave your region (for instance, I cannot leave Lombardy).
The plan makes sense to me - they decided to put 14 days between each group of permissions in order to monitor the effects.
If something goes wrong, we will go back to full quarantine.
I do hope that people will follow the rules and be careful when outside - numbers decreased significantly in all Italy, with the exception of Milan. So if we keep following them, we can enjoy pieces of everyday life outside our home.
EDIT: Of course I'm speaking locally, while jj is speaking nationally. My point is that except for a few areas, and California, "quarantine" efforts are being largely observed and effective. It is still early yet, and I worry that some may be reopening prematurely.
I'm skeptical of this point. I think it's super premature to draw any conclusions about the characteristics of the virus based on data so far. People should recognize that we're actually still in the early stages of the pandemic. There's plenty of ways to look at the data anecdotally that belie the warmth hypothesis -- southern Europe doing worse than northern Europe, for example.
Not to mention that there's a serious complication in how to count deaths, whether they're being reported accurately. Tropical countries tend to be poorer and have weaker counting measures period, so, again, I think it's way too early to draw conclusions here. We certainly have strong anecdotal evidence that the virus is capable of spreading at pandemic levels in tropical climes: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/22/ecuador-guayaquil-mayor- But as that article notes, Ecuador also is likely doing a poor job of reporting its coronavirus total, at least currently.
This goes for stories about miracle cures or treatments as well. Just as with any crisis where there's a lot of breaking news, there's a lot of "facts" that get thrown around early on that ends up being wrong.
https://www.ft.com/content/6bd88b7d-3386-4543-b2e9-0d5c6fac846c
This Twitter thread also covers it:
Yeah as early as mid-March I was seeing some speculation that under-reporting (unintentional and intentional) was widespread, but as time goes on there seems to be more and more evidence stacking up to move that out of the realm of speculation.
This is certainly a hopeful development and, with luck, good results will be obtained from a number of other trials still ongoing. However, the NIAID trial results have not yet been published, so it's not yet possible to assess the real benefit to be expected even purely on the basis of this trial. If, for instance, the drug shortened the duration of mild symptoms, but had no impact on more severe cases that result in death, it would be of limited value.
TR
Yes. While the results of several trials have indeed shown a positive effect of remdesivir, it should be noted that it is not a "cure" for COVID-19. All we know so far is that it seems to speed up recovery times by a third; we don't know yet whether it proves effective across the board, and whether or not it has measurable benefits for people in severe distress (that is, people who would have died if not given the drug, versus people who would have recovered anyway if they hadn't taken remdesivir, and it just sped up their recovery time).
Nevertheless, the fact that we do now have a drug that speeds recovery WILL be of benefit via the fact that it will free up hospital beds faster and help ease pressure on healthcare workers by eliminating caseloads at a quicker rate.
Looking at the NIAID press release about the trial it does in fact refer to an improvement in mortality as well as a reduction in recovery time. Given that the former hasn't been emphasized in briefings I suspect it wasn't statistically significant, but that's still another positive sign.