Covid19mathblog.com
The golden-standard trail for a drug is finished from Remdesivir – certainly if money wasn’t a concern you would take it – but given the relatively slight improvement IF you had to pay for it – it may just not be something you would take….. https://theconversation.com/remdesivir-study-finally-published-an-expert-in-critical-care-medicine-gives-us-his-verdict-147862
“The trial follows a gold-standard design of being double blind, randomised and controlled, and like most trials published in top medical journals, at first glance the outcomes are fairly impressive. They found that patients receiving the drug improved and recovered more quickly, were less likely to progress to severe disease, were discharged from hospital sooner, and had a lower death rate of 11.4% compared with 15.2% in patients receiving “usual” treatment.
Based on these positive findings, it would be tempting to conclude that all patients who have the disease should receive the drug, but since it costs around US$2,340 (£1,795) to treat one patient, and is likely to be in short supply in the UK for the foreseeable future, the question warrants a more considered analysis.”
“Remdesivir has not been around long enough to have a track record for safety, and the reports of side-effects in COVID patients continue to grow.”
“When we unpick the data and look at analyses of smaller groups (subgroup analyses), the only patients for whom benefit was conclusively demonstrated were those who were less severely ill and receiving only supplemental oxygen rather than being on a ventilator.”
“Another interesting subgroup analysis showed that patients receiving dexamethasone showed added benefit with the addition of remdesivir, which is good news”
“By prescribing remdesivir on top of applying the best treatment available, one in ten patients will continue to deteriorate and die. Remdesivir is not the magic bullet. If one exists, it has yet to be designed.”
The worse flu season over the last decade was 2017-2018 where 39-58 Million infected with only 46-95K death – https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/past-seasons.html
Once again we showed the age profile of death for covid and flu is the same. IF we are to extrapolate this to mean near equivalent lethality but more virulent – then we are talking about 102-152 million infected. This means we have a long ways for confirmation – currently only confirmed 7.2 Million! Do we really want to pay for that many test – assume $10 a test we have to spend almost 1 billion more. Statistically sampling similar to polling will result in reasonable results without paying for $1 billion for test that won’t change your response.
Reported death is really dwindling – US at 317 France and Spain making up a lot of the confirmations.
FL leads death at 48. New confirmation leaders TN and IL
LA starting to look like confirmations may start rising
Had to double my limit from countries with death 2k to 4k….Russia is still looking quite good if you believe the numbers – decent amount of testing yet death per capita low with a decent amount of confirmed per captia.
