“It'll all be over by Christmas” (Part 2)

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2020/07/itll-all-be-over-by-christmas-.html

by jacquesm • 6 years ago

108 124 6 years ago

atemerev6• 6 years ago

Here are my observations as an actual epidemiologist:

1) Quarantine / non-pharmaceutical interventions effects start to be visible after about 2 weeks from their introduction, and are fully effective after 1.5 months.

2) Daily new deaths growth lags from daily new cases growth about a month (which is somewhat obvious, but needs to be reiterated).

So, unless some new mitigation measures are going to be introduced _right now_, this record-breaking growth will continue for quite more than a few weeks, followed by the corresponding growth of deaths a month later. We are far away from the saturation point and any resemblance of "population immunity".

ghiculescu2• 6 years ago

#2 isn’t obvious to me. Can you explain why?

hef19898• 6 years ago

Bluntly put, it takes time to die from any disease.

heavyset_go6• 6 years ago

It takes about two weeks for symptoms to arise and become severe, and then about another two weeks of severe symptoms that require ventilators before people die.

jupp0r4• 6 years ago

It takes time to die from this disease and time for that death to show up in the official numbers.

mononcqc• 6 years ago

The time for symptoms to show up is of roughly 2 weeks but the median time is at about 6-8 days. After symptoms show up, it takes a while before people get hospitalized, and then mortality seem to take roughly 21-24 days after hospitalization.

This means that from the time someone is infected until they die, a month and a half can have gone through.

By the time you take new isolation measures, you have to wait roughly two weeks to see if daily infection rates start to vary. But the lethality at this point, assuming no change in healthcare system overload, can be more or less statically predicted for weeks after the fact.

Those are called "lagging indicators"; the main thing you try to prevent are deaths, which you can lower by reducing the overload on the healthcare systems, which you can lower by controlling infection rates and keeping them low.

Due to the duration of the disease's evolution, you get to see if your policies really worked more than a month and a half after enacting them, which is extremely slow for a disease that propagates at exponential rates. So people look for proxies like infection rates that are still lagging, but far less so.

Do note that the one good metric you want in the end is going to be "excess deaths", which counts the impact of not just the diseases, but of all other side issues that the disease may have caused. This can usually take months up to years to properly account and analyze.

emiliobumachar• 6 years ago

Thanks for the info. Could you, or anyone else, please explain why quarantine takes 1.5 months to be fully effective?

atemerev6• 6 years ago

Because there is an incubation period, where people already infected start to develop first symptoms. There is a development period (from the first symptoms to the point where they are severe enough for the person to seek medical help — only at this point the case is registered). The introduction of quarantine measures is not immediately effective — there is a transition period of at least few days. There are response / case registration delays. And finally, it takes some time for the new epidemic regime just to be visible on the curve (a perceptive delay until the trend is understandable).

emn134• 6 years ago

On number 2: that makes a lot of sense; yet in places that have had peaks (e.g. new york, italy, UK, spain) the peak observed fatality moment is barely shifted vs. the peak positive testing moment - maybe more like a week or so, normally? In all the data it's a little hard to spot trends, especially with testing rates scaling up, but still the graph peaks are not even close to a month apart, even where testing rates don't appear to be too variable.

One comparison: https://datagraver.com/corona/#/?regions=italy:hex005FA2,spa...

Massachusetts has fairly well defined peaks too: https://covidtracking.com/data/state/massachusetts

What's causing this discrepancy? Clearly the disease progression isn't that fast, so... what then? Maybe the more vulnerable groups tend to get hit more quickly, and as cases ramp up either die earlier or lock down more rigorously or both, such that the less-vulnerable form an infection peak after the death peak has passed? Or is it simply that people get tested late in the disease progression?

Given how little the MA testing rate has varied, and that the positive rate peaks also are much closer than a month apart from the fatality peak, I don't think testing changes seem likely to be a primary cause of the (to me) unexpectedly short period between case peak and death peak.

lubujackson• 6 years ago

The big difference is testing capabilities. All places hit by big waves early on suffered from poor testing and public awareness, so testing happened in a burst as the deaths were starting to become problematic. And generally those getting tested at peaks were the symptomatic/hospitalized. NYC is estimated to have been around 20% infected, so the actual infection count was highly undereported. It is important to also recognize that every location hit hard was met with immediate lockdown, generally followed well by scared populations.

The situation is far different now, with a good chunk of people actively rejecting even basic distancing measures. If you look beyond positive test numbers at the % positive you can see the rates are rising even faster beyond our testing capabilities. And the idea that only 20-30 year olds are getting the disease is wishful thinking - the highest risk situation is from household transmission, at over 80% likely.

Combine high infections with a general disregard of safety and those older populations are bound to be infected as young spreaders interact with their families, at offices, supermarkets, etc. I think this is why the death spike lags a fair bit further than expected.

jhayward• 6 years ago

Although treatment has definitely improved outcomes, IMO, at least some of this effect has to be due to the changing demographics of testing.

In the early days patients essentially had to be far along in the progress of the disease to be tested, we simply had very little testing capacity.

Now we are doing many times more tests against a much wider set of subjects. So it is inevitable that we are getting more of the milder cases and cases earlier in their development. This also accounts for the so-called “shift” toward many more young patients.

The disease hasn’t changed. Current testing is sampling a different distribution of patients than previous months had been.

ramraj07• 6 years ago

How do you explain the "sudden drop" in cases in new York [1] after reaching some 25% infection rate? Do you think herd immunity (ish) can be reached at a lower saturation rate possibly?

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/20/nyregion/hospitals-corona...

belltaco5• 6 years ago

That seems to fit into the theory that quarantine lockdown measures are most effective after 1.5 months.

guscost13• 6 years ago

So, unless some new mitigation measures are going to be introduced _right now_,

You will be able to claim that any changes made by local and state governments in the next few days/weeks “did the trick”. Nevertheless, this is a fair escape hatch when the following prediction does not come true:

this record-breaking growth will continue for quite more than a few weeks, followed by the corresponding growth of deaths a month later. We are far away from the saturation point and any resemblance of "population immunity".

You will be proven wrong, both about the coming “wave of death”, and about how far we are from the saturation point. I’m quoting this and publicly disagreeing today, so that you might remember later on, and maybe even acknowledge that you got it wrong.

elipsey• 6 years ago

Hi. I read the essay "Pandemic Woo" which is linked in your profile.

Is seems like your position is that:

--COVID response strategy based on invalid "post-modern science",

--the conclusion that the disease death rate is order of one percent is incorrect

--and therefore, the policy response is grossly disproportionate and harmful.

It seems like you are arguing about facts not values, and you think the disease death rate is not really order of %1. Is this what you mean?

I'm also asking because I have heard many heated statements about "post-modern" science around here as of late that wherein the speaker seems to treat that concept as common knowledge, and then walks off without explaining themselves, but I don't really understand what they are on about.

ericb3• 6 years ago

On what basis do you stake your claim?

atemerev6• 6 years ago

Sure, a fair point, I am not the all-seeing all-knowing authority. You have mentioned "a few days" — how about meeting here the next Friday and see who was right? There won't be any significant increase in the daily deaths (yet), but there should be another increase in the number of cases.

(I have (unfortunately) already won a few bets like that, but it's always a chance that I am wrong this time, of course).

In fact, there is already a failed prediction in your essay: "but we will fail to see the 'second wave' that was predicted". The second wave happened. Exactly in the way we, "postmodernist scientists", have predicted. I will be the first one to tell you that indeed, there are many problems in modern science. But this is not one of them.

thedrbrian2• 6 years ago

Hydroxychloroquine might not be as bust as people thought

https://www.preprints.org/manuscript/202007.0025/v1/download

wizzwizz4• 6 years ago

I very much doubt that. Certain compounds of zinc are known to help; I bet that's the effect they're seeing.

sipior2• 6 years ago

In fact the paper explicitly discusses (p. 14-16) potential synergistic effects between zinc and hydroxychloroquine, and provides references to another study suggesting the same. Care to comment, Doctor?

jonhohle5• 6 years ago

https://www.ijidonline.com/article/S1201-9712(20)30534-8/ful... suggests 66% reduction in mortality with hydroxychloroquine alone and 71% with hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin. Zinc is not mentioned in the paper.

I’ve informally been following testing and it seems like every paper published against hydroxychloroquine is either not peer reviewed, the data is suspect and unavailable, or are promoted by groups with financial interest in another solution.

Assuming that hydroxychloroquine in fact has no benefit, there also seems to be limited evidence that it causes complications and has been widely used without issue until this pandemic. If me or my family were hospitalized with COVID, I would push hard for immediate hydroxychloroquine treatment along with whatever schedule was prescribed assuming no known contraindications.

If tomorrow a new treatment emerged and had consistently repeatable results described in peer reviewed journals, I’d gladly change my strategy. Screw media and political fear mongering. Show me repeatable statistics.

numpad0• 6 years ago

cache:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...

http://web.archive.org/web/20200703132003/http://www.antipop...

https://megalodon.jp/2020-0703-2248-09/www.antipope.org/char...

beervirus• 6 years ago

New evidence has been coming out that HCQ + azithromycin is not a bust. Not a magic bullet, but a very decent mitigation.

https://www.ijidonline.com/article/S1201-9712(20)30534-8/ful...

belltaco5• 6 years ago

That's an observational study, which don't turn to be true all the time. The randomized controlled trials have shown it's a bust.

jonhohle5• 6 years ago

From the author:

“Our dosing also differed from other studies not showing a benefit of the drug. And other studies are either not peer reviewed, have limited numbers of patients, different patient populations or other differences from our patients.”

ribs• 6 years ago

While the text is pleasantly written and free of noticeable counterfactuals, it’s just a recounting of what’s happened. It doesn’t provide new insight.

Also, who was being quoted in the title?

SloopJon• 6 years ago

Also, who was being quoted in the title?

It's from World War I. See this comment on the (flagged) submission of the last post:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22897805

dcolkitt• 6 years ago

For reference, the well-worn anecdote about everyone saying "it'll all be over by Christmas" at the beginning of World War I didn't actually really happen.

That was a later anachronism, and the phrase "over by Christmas" doesn't appear until late 1917. It was used as an intentional exaggeration to describe how those in Britain at the end of the war felt about the decision to enter the war in 1914.

The reality is that very observers anticipated an "easy" war. Virtually everybody predicted that the conflict would be the most destructive since the Napoleonic wars, and collapse the world economy. Overwhelming majority of the British public and politicians expressed a preference for neutrality. It wasn't until the Germans marched straight through the heart of neutral Belgium, and their sheer degree of wanton looting and destruction, that public opinion turned.

It's very clear that even in 1914 nobody thought it would be an "easy" war. Germany's Rape of Belgium led Britain, and later America, to reluctantly intervene. However it's a testament to the sheer scale of carnage in World War I that even these very dour predictions turned out to be underestimates.

throwaway0a5e• 6 years ago

I think it's pretty disingenuous to compare a disease to a war between major powers.

Russia isn't going to invade Germany if Germany stomps on Coronavirus because Coronavirus kills a duke. Nobody is on the side of the virus. Unlike retaking Eastern France, progress eradicating Coronavirus does not have to necessarily be over other people's dead bodies. Nearly all of humanity wants to see this disease gone. The circumstances are very, very different.

jsnell• 6 years ago

Hm. Are you sure? I thought "home before the leaves fall" was a legit quote (modulo translation). And the German war plans had to predicated on a quick and victorious war, because in the beginning they were not in a position to fight a long one.

Stratoscope• 6 years ago

The reality is that very observers anticipated an "easy" war.

Just for clarity, I think you meant:

The reality is that very few observers anticipated an "easy" war.

wayneftw• 6 years ago

HTTPS link - https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2020/07/itll-al...

Surprised it didn’t redirect by itself.

jancsika• 6 years ago

To be fair, George Floyd was brutally murdered by the Minneapolis police department on May 25th, and the predictive blog entry I'm referring back to was posted more than a month earlier.

That's not the only such murder, and it's not the only one caught on video.

If a "predictive blog" isn't based largely on the body of publicly available past evidence (i.e., history), what's the point of the endeavor?

brianmcc• 6 years ago

It's a predictive blog entry, not a predictive blog overall. He's not some genius super forecaster like Dom Cummings :-)

He is though successful Sci-Fi author Charles Stross in case you didn't pick that up from the page, and he's penned some pretty insightful posts in his time blogging too.

tzs2• 6 years ago

None of the earlier ones sparked world wide protests, or even much in the way of nationwide protests. That's what he's talking about when he says he didn't predict it.

SmokeyHamster3• 6 years ago

Because the US lockdown didn't really begin to lift until June, the USA is hitting this secondary surge right now, and some states are trying to lock down again. Red states with Republican governors who are in complete denial are getting hit badly, though—notably Texas and Florida.

They really had to get partisan, didn't they? Unfortunately, the data doesn't support this claim. The fatality rate in both Texas and Florida has been flat since peaking in April, and their overall number of cases has been just a fraction of what they are in California and New York. But hey, they're run by Republicans, therefore we have to call them evil, meanwhile ignore the thousands of people literally massing in the streets spreading Covid in Democrat-run states...

[Texas fatality rate](https://www.google.com/search?source=hp&ei=gUn_XoLnLJmxytMPu...).

[Florida fatality rate](https://www.google.com/search?source=hp&ei=tEn_XoKrOpesytMPj...).

Overall cases are either flat or slightly increasing, as was predicted. The lockdown was never expected to make Covid go away. Only to ["flatten the curve"](https://healthblog.uofmhealth.org/wellness-prevention/flatte...), e.g. slow down the spread so that hospitals wouldn't get overwhelmed.

Hello71• 6 years ago

this is a joke, right?

https://www.google.com/search?q=texas+covid+cases

https://www.google.com/search?q=florida+covid+cases

haberdasher• 6 years ago

Also, deaths lag cases.

SmokeyHamster3• 6 years ago

this is a joke, right?

Cases != fatalities.

A lot of places are doing a lot more testing. That causes case count to rise. That doesn't mean the disease is spreading beyond control. If it were, the fatality rate would also be increasing, which it's not.

Sorry, but you're going to have to find some other reason to justify your partisan hate boner.

jonhohle5• 6 years ago

Denominators are important. Statistics are important. A raw count without other supporting data (how many tests have been given, what is the population in areas where cases are increasing) has absolutely no meaning.

There have been ≈3.5M cases in the US. That sounds awful! That’s out of 35M people tested. At its peak the infection rate for people tested in the US was around 12%. The current infection rate is 9%. The rate is falling, not rising. As more people are tested the numerator increases - it’s a tautology. It’s meaningless without understanding the context.

Media outlets Are going to drown out any rational discussion (and search results) with their hyperbole.

ggggtez2• 6 years ago

partisan

First point: Do you really think it's partisan to point out that governors from the same political party tend to follow similar courses of action?

Second point: let's use your own data against you [1][2]. According to you, overall cases are "flat or slightly increasing" but actually your chart is about deaths. The overall cases have doubled in the last week. Which means, all things being equal, that over the next two weeks or so, we'll be seeing a doubling of deaths follow suit.

[1] https://www.google.com/search?source=hp&ei=tEn_XoKrOpesytMPj...

[2] https://www.google.com/search?source=hp&ei=gUn_XoLnLJmxytMPu...

guscost13• 6 years ago

It is absolutely partisan to characterize their actions with the phrase "in complete denial", without acknowledging that there are serious and fatal consequences of any lockdown that must be weighed against the benefits. These governors are probably making a good-faith judgement call which (while perhaps in error) is about as far from "denial" as it is possible to be. What else but partisanship could motivate the ridiculous claim that governors belonging to one political party are flatly ignoring the risk of additional infection?

To me personally, the tone comes across as way beyond partisan. It is smug, disgusting bullying.

tzs2• 6 years ago

meanwhile ignore the thousands of people literally massing in the streets spreading Covid in Democrat-run states...

Those protests were in open air, with a very large majority wearing masks, with people constantly moving about so if you did come near an infected person you probably weren't near them long enough to get an infectious dose.

Also, in some of the cities officials did heavy testing of people at the protests or after they attended. In Minneapolis they got 1.8% positive among 3200 people they tested at the protest, and 1% among 8500 people who sought tests afterwards citing attending the protests as their reason for concern. Seattle had less than 1% positive among the 3000 protestors it tested. Boston had 1.1% among the ~1300 it tested.

As mentioned above, when you encounter an infected person in passing in an open air event with both of you wearing masks, you probably won't get an infectious dose. And with only 1-2% of the people at that event infected, you probably won't encounter enough of them to get an accumulated infectious dose either.

Yes, it is better not to have these protests during a pandemic...but at least they held the protests in places that minimized the risk and the attendees took steps to protect themselves.

Contrast this to groups that are holding their mass gatherings indoors in places where attendees will be relatively static for hours, where most attendees will not take any protective steps, and where they are discouraging even social distancing.

Also, many of the attendees will have not been taking any protective steps in the days or weeks before, so I'd expect the percentage infected going into the event to be higher than it was for the people going into the protests.

The big difference between these events and the protests is that in the later case the organizers recognized the risk and tried to limit it. They may have underestimated the risk of overestimated the effectiveness of their mitigations (although so far the numbers look like they were probably right), but if so that's a quantitative error not a qualitative one.

Those indoor, don't move around, don't mitigate the risk events, are not even trying to mitigate the risk. They are making a qualitative error.

gfodor2• 6 years ago

A sure sign someone's brain has been addled by partisanship is if they embrace the idea that certain drugs being researched have a red or blue hue to them.

One output of all this is that those who, for example, reveal their expectation of HCQ to have been one of 'snake oil' simply due to a Trump tweet have taken themselves off the field when it comes to rational discourse.

edit: For those down-voting me, my guess is you were not reading papers back in early February from China and South Korea as I was about early drugs worth trialing. If your expectations of a given drug's efficacy was informed by political tweets you weren't paying attention to the trial pipeline.

nostrademons3• 6 years ago

The author is British - U.S. partisanship doesn't really affect him, because he can't vote and isn't subject to U.S. laws anyway. This is how the rest of the world sees us.

dfee• 6 years ago

Wasn’t my experience as an American living in London.

Labour and Tory mapped well enough to US politics.

saalweachter• 6 years ago

For those down-voting me, my guess is you were not reading papers back in early February from China and South Korea as I was about early drugs worth trialing. If your expectations of a given drug's efficacy was informed by political tweets you weren't paying attention to the trial pipeline.

This is, kind of exactly how snake oil works? It's not even the typical South Park / "2. ????" plan.

It's "1. Take a treatment that people are already credulous towards." "2. Sell it for lots of money while pretending it's a sure thing." "3. Run away with lots of money before anyone catches on that it's not actually worthwhile."

The thing with snake oil and real science based medicine is that they both start with that first step, of grabbing a bunch of things that seem plausible. The difference is that science based medicine first tests to see if it works before selling it for lots of money to lots of people as a cure, instead of after (or never). The initial ideas and plausibility are only occasionally different; science is a tool for finding a lot of things that don't work, and a very few that do.

gfodor2• 6 years ago

I have no idea what you're talking about. There were medical papers published out of SK in February indicating preliminary signs that some drugs were worth investigating. The investigations happened. The results were published.

If you were sitting through that process feeling like you knew which way it was going to go one way or the other based upon political tweets then you'd describe it as "snake oil" as the author did, when in fact it was just the normal, albeit accelerated, clinical research process with a lot of noise from the bleachers. My own assessment is any scenarios where preliminary data was less than ideal (eg due to non-randomization) was published in the interest of sharing information due to the urgency of the crisis to help guide further controlled trial development. And look, it worked, most of the drugs who had early papers published with clinical patient data pointing in a positive direction did in fact get into trials. Unfortunately so far there have been no home runs but some solid base hits.

The reality is that most of these kinds of things like using the term "snake oil" to describe HCQ are an obvious "tell" on the part of people who consider themselves immune to cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias to be anything but.

zaroth5• 6 years ago

I saw something very bizarre yesterday, which seems like it could totally explain the surging case counts while death rate continues to fall, but I can’t quite believe it’s really happening.

Apparently since about mid-April the CDC decided that the COVID Case Count would include not just positive tests, but also “probable” cases.

Probable cases are not like the Presumptive Positive cases we had early on where a state lab had a positive test but they wanted to confirm it at the CDC lab.

The criteria for a “probable case” does not require a positive lab test at all, but simply a combination of symptoms (like a cough or fever) and contact with another person who themselves was positive or probably positive.

Collin County (6th largest county in Texas) had a council meeting which included a presentation on this where they walk through the new criteria, which includes a slide showing how 1 positive lab test can result in the case count increasing by 17.

Here’s an excerpt from that part of the council meeting;

https://twitter.com/sav_says_/status/1278090647140995073?s=2...

And in case you’re dubious, here’s the whole meeting, and you can scroll to about 15:25 to see this part;

https://collincountytx.new.swagit.com/videos/62477

nostrademons3• 6 years ago

The CDC case numbers are useless. Aside from the "probable" case issue, for a long time they were also including antibody tests in the total. Antibody tests measure the number of people who have ever had coronavirus, not the number of active infections, thus conflating two very different statistics.

Most coronavirus trackers aggregate state & county level data, which doesn't suffer from the same blatant incompetence as the CDC data. It tells the same story, though: case counts are increasing exponentially, with a current doubling time of about a week, and the percent positive rate (a measure of how much testing is undercounting the true infection rate) is rapidly going up in many locations.

zaroth5• 6 years ago

Even the NYT COVID tracker page has the following note;

“In the tallies shown on this page, The Times is now including cases that have been identified by public health officials as probable coronavirus patients.”

graeme• 6 years ago

Deaths lag cases by about a month. Would expect to see the new cases result in deaths a month from now. It can take a while to die from covid, and also death statistics take a delay to compile.

zaroth5• 6 years ago

There has been a clear divergence, even accounting for the expected lag in death rate.

The daily case count and daily death count initially look like two of the same curve simply shifted — as you might expect.

Since approximately mid-April that has no longer the case and they are fundamentally different curves.

You can see it here if you scroll down to where the daily charts are one above the other;

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-us-c...

Something big changed (or several smaller somethings) mid-April to cause this divergence.

If the case count measurement is no longer measuring actual positive cases, that could be a big part of the problem.

guscost13• 6 years ago

Reporting standards have definitely been changing over a similar time period, but this alone may not be sufficient to explain the recent jump in cases:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/cdc-wants-stat...

Of course this obvious factor is not mentioned anywhere in the headline coverage of the case numbers, which says a lot.

heavyset_go6• 6 years ago

This is standard. You can fairly well deduce that someone died from CoVID from their presentation of symptoms, and a CT scan. A test is not necessary to make that determination, and similarly, it is a waste to test the dead when there are plenty of people who are alive and presenting symptoms today.

guscost13• 6 years ago

This was not standard in [most of] the US two months ago.

kevin_thibedeau• 6 years ago

Who is paying for a CT scan on corpses? People are still getting multi-thousand dollar bills for a nasal swab.

acqq• 6 years ago

Apparently since about mid-April the CDC decided that the COVID Case Count would include not just positive tests, but also “probable” cases.

This is easy to compare with the past data:

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/

Looking at the 7 day moving average:

April 20: around 30K cases per day; May 20: around 24K cases per day; June 12: around 22K cases per day; July 2: 47K cases per day

Doesn't fit at all with the "mid-April" hypothesis. The number of cases stayed for quite a while below 30K, only to surge very recently.

Also see how the curves for different states differ, and note how it's completely different from the shape of the curves following the tests:

https://covidgraph.com/usa/#daily

Also: "Adm. Brett Giroir, the man Trump appointed to oversee testing, testified at a House hearing Thursday that "this is a real increase in cases" and not just attributable to increased testing. "There is no question that the more testing you get, the more you will uncover," Giroir said Thursday. "But we do believe this is a real increase in cases because of the percent positives are going up. So, this is real increases in cases." Giroir said the U.S. is not flattening the curve. "The curve is still going up," he testified."

https://abcnews.go.com/US/coronavirus-updates-arizona-bar-al...

skinnymuch• 6 years ago

I don’t think parent is right, but the 7 day avg test numbers are largely explained by just the tri-State NYC numbers. NYC, NJ, CT dropped more than the case avg by the June stat.

SmokeyHamster3• 6 years ago

Hydroxychloroquine is a bust (snake oil is about what you can expect from a snake oil salesman).

Several studies have now confirmed it's beneficial:

https://www.sciencetimes.com/articles/25658/20200512/hydroxy...

https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2020/07/02/health/hydroxychloroquine...

and the studies "debunking" it's benefits or claiming it's evenbad have been retracted by their publishers as bad science.

https://bgr.com/2020/06/05/coronavirus-drug-update-massive-h...

https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/0...

Why is this so controversial? Hydroxychloroquine's been used for years as a treatment for Malaria and high altitude sickness, since both of those cause a decrease in blood oxygen and it helps increase the body's hemoglobin production.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7175905/

He's so desperate to Tuck Frump that he's now throwing out good science that disagrees with his politics? No one, not even Trump said hydroxychloroquine was a panacea or vaccine, just something that could potentially help that we were "looking into", and everyone on the left lost their minds.

Edit: To everyone downvoting me, link to proof (e.g. peer reviewed study that hasn't been retracted) that Hydroxychloroquine has absolutely zero benefits, and I'll promise to vote Biden. I'll hold my breath...

eagsalazar22• 6 years ago

We should all agree to come back and read this thread in 3 weeks and, many of us, apologize for being completely wrong in our angry, condescending and ultimately irrational responses, then think deeply about where we were coming from in this moment.

jacquesm2• 6 years ago

It's mostly hope. But hope is not a strategy and never was. The time to really fix this was early February at the latest. Acting too late in order to protect 'the market' did more damage to the market than would have ever been the case if the initial response had been on point. The difference between the countries that acted immediately, a bit later and much too late is stark.

seren• 6 years ago

This is not a very productive comment, but I really love blogs over twitter threads, or instagram story, or any other shallow system, even more so when it is written by a professional writer, with some British humor sprinkled on top of it.

“It'll all be over by Christmas” (Part 2)

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