Dexamethasone is first life-saving coronavirus drug

A cheap and widely available drug called dexamethasone can help save the lives of patients who are seriously ill with coronavirus.

UK experts say the low-dose steroid treatment is a major breakthrough in the fight against the deadly virus.

It cut the risk of death by a third for patients on ventilators. For those on oxygen, it cut deaths by a fifth.

The drug is part of the world's biggest trial testing existing treatments to see if they also work for coronavirus.

Researchers estimate that if the drug had been used to treat patients in the UK from the start of the coronavirus pandemic up to 5,000 lives could have been saved. Because it is cheap, it could also be of huge benefit in poorer countries struggling with high numbers of Covid-19 patients.

Latest coronavirus updatesLife-saver

About 19 out of 20 patients with coronavirus recover without being admitted to hospital. Of those who are admitted to hospital, most also recover, but some may need oxygen or mechanical ventilation. These are the high-risk patients whom dexamethasone appears to help.

The drug is already used to reduce inflammation in a range of other conditions, and it appears that it helps stop some of the damage that can happen when the body's immune system goes into overdrive as it tries to fight off coronavirus.

The body's over-reaction is called a cytokine storm and it can be deadly.

In the trial, led by a team from Oxford University, around 2,000 hospital patients were given dexamethasone and were compared with more than 4,000 who did not receive the drug.

For patients on ventilators, it cut the risk of death from 40% to 28%. For patients needing oxygen, it cut the risk of death from 25% to 20%.

Chief investigator Prof Peter Horby said: "This is the only drug so far that has been shown to reduce mortality - and it reduces it significantly. It's a major breakthrough."

Lead researcher Prof Martin Landray says the findings suggest that for every eight patients treated on ventilators, you could save one life.

For those patients treated with oxygen, you save one life for approximately every 20-25 treated with the drug.

"There is a clear, clear benefit. The treatment is up to 10 days of dexamethasone and it costs about £5 per patient. So essentially it costs £35 to save a life. This is a drug that is globally available."

Prof Landray said, when appropriate, hospital patients should now be given it without delay, but people should not go out and buy it to take at home.

Dexamethasone does not appear to help people with milder symptoms of coronavirus - those who don't need help with their breathing.

The Recovery Trial has been running

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-53061281

So this cheap, generic steroid significantly reduced deaths for those on ventilators and oxygen (doesn't do anything for those with mild to moderate symptoms)

This is why playing for time is so important, and just giving up and opening everything up now is gross negligence

martin wrote:kind of scary how some countries handle corona outbreaks and how we compare

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https://twitter.com/JChengWSJ/status/1272167266008752129

Troubling

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https://twitter.com/StevenTDennis/status/1272907588821307392

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https://twitter.com/MattGertz/status/1272630032897323012

Our gov't could have gone with a strategy of giving everyone monthly checks for a solid 3-6 months but determined that corporate entities were more important than people dying

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https://twitter.com/NYGovCuomo/status/1273281536167682049

martin wrote:

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https://twitter.com/brianbeutler/status/1273250753705099265

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https://twitter.com/JoyceWhiteVance/status/1273244410298368001

Absolute fools.

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/failure-abject-failure

I have spent a lot of time analyzing the New York COVID epidemic both because it was the center of the storm in the United States and because it affects me, my loved ones and coworkers so directly. The graphed shapes of the New York outbreak and the nationwide outbreak are quite different. The former rockets upward and falls down again at a slower but still comparable arc. Nationwide it’s quite different. The numbers rocket upward and then basically plateau. It’s not a proper comparison. The epicenter of an outbreak has different dynamics than the more rolling spread of contagion in less hard hit areas. This is why the proper comparison is not New York vs the United States or the United States versus any European country, all of which are dramatically smaller than the US, both in geography and population. The proper comparison is the United States (~330 million) vs the EU (~440 million). This brings together hotspots and peripheries, urban and rural and all the mix of population densities into one. As you can see here the progress has been very different and not at all good for the control of the epidemic in the United States.

BigDaddyG wrote:https://www.ibtimes.sg/humans-may-never-develop-immunity-against-covid-19-suggests-us-chinese-joint-study-47055
Humans May Never Develop Immunity Against COVID-19, Suggests US-Chinese Joint Study
Chinese and American researchers made the conclusion after finding just 4% of 23,000 samples could develop antibodies

The Chinese and American scientists found an answer to their quarries on immunity against the novel Coronavirus. The final outcome of their analysis came after they looked into a study on whether hospital workers in Wuhan who were directly exposed to infected patients at the early stage of the outbreak had developed antibodies. Their findings suggested that there may be no immunity against the COVID-19.

The scientists said that at least a quarter of over 23,000 samples tested could have been infected with the virus at some stage but only four percent were found to have developed antibodies as of April. The researchers said in a non-peer-reviewed paper posted on preprint website medRxiv.org on Tuesday that said, "People are unlikely to produce long-lasting protective antibodies against this virus."

I'm not smart enough to understand what all this means. No antibodies produced for those who may have been positive.... meaning they could catch again? Could still spread (perhaps only when they have symptoms)?

Kinda scary

BigDaddyG wrote:

martin wrote:

BigDaddyG wrote:https://www.ibtimes.sg/humans-may-never-develop-immunity-against-covid-19-suggests-us-chinese-joint-study-47055
Humans May Never Develop Immunity Against COVID-19, Suggests US-Chinese Joint Study
Chinese and American researchers made the conclusion after finding just 4% of 23,000 samples could develop antibodies

The Chinese and American scientists found an answer to their quarries on immunity against the novel Coronavirus. The final outcome of their analysis came after they looked into a study on whether hospital workers in Wuhan who were directly exposed to infected patients at the early stage of the outbreak had developed antibodies. Their findings suggested that there may be no immunity against the COVID-19.

The scientists said that at least a quarter of over 23,000 samples tested could have been infected with the virus at some stage but only four percent were found to have developed antibodies as of April. The researchers said in a non-peer-reviewed paper posted on preprint website medRxiv.org on Tuesday that said, "People are unlikely to produce long-lasting protective antibodies against this virus."

I'm not smart enough to understand what all this means. No antibodies produced for those who may have been positive.... meaning they could catch again? Could still spread (perhaps only when they have symptoms)?

Kinda scary

Yeah, also, what does this mean for traditional viral vaccines? Will the concept of herd immunization turn to heard slaughter? How cost efficient will a vaccine be even if it's developed? This really is scary if the findings are found to be accurate.

So far, the gov't has failed at supply chain management and production of various supplies throughout all of this, I'd guess we are as ****ed with management of a potential vaccine as well. Not the development of the actual vaccine but what comes after that.

The modern American economy is top-heavy by design.

In the late 1970s, many U.S. policymakers decided that income inequality had gotten too low. Strong union contracts had enabled many workers to earn more than their labor was worth, while excessive taxation of business was depressing productive investment. As a result, demand for goods had come to outstrip supply, leading to rising prices, which led to higher interest rates — which further discouraged supply-expanding investment — in a vicious, stagflationary cycle.

To the high priests of Reaganomics, the way out of this morass was clear: America needed to divert income away from those who spend it (i.e. workers) and toward those who invest it (i.e. the rich). After all, consumption gobbles up scarce resources, while investment reduces scarcity by enhancing the economy’s productive capacity. Breaking labor unions and slashing capital gains taxes would make the economy less equal. But such policies would also channel a higher share of national income toward growth-enhancing projects. And this would leave the typical worker with a somewhat smaller slice of a much larger economic pie. A rising tide would lift even the humblest of dinghies.

The basic premise of this growth model — that one can increase long-term, societal prosperity by suppressing consumption to fuel investment — may be valid in some contexts. For example, if you are a developing country that lacks basic infrastructure and manufacturing capacity, expanding the share of income available for investment will typically increase your overall wealth. China’s explosive growth during the 1990s and early aughts was built atop precisely this model. To make more capital available for rapid industrialization, authorities suppressed wages. This produced growth robust enough to lift workers’ living standards even as their share of income gains fell. Eventually, however, this strategy becomes self-defeating.

Channeling investment into genuinely productive projects gets harder once you’ve picked the low-hanging industrial fruit. And this challenge is all the greater in a context where the purchasing power of ordinary people has been systematically depressed: Simply put, when the vast majority of workers have little discretionary income, profitable business ideas are harder to find (businesses need paying customers, after all). Thus, at a certain point, wage suppression stops aiding growth and starts inhibiting it. In their (excellent) new book, Peking University economist Michael Pettis and Barron’s columnist Matthew Klein argue that China’s iteration of the investment-led development model has been obsolete for more than a decade. Unwilling or incapable of enacting reforms that would increase wages — and thus, consumption — Beijing has sustained employment and GDP growth by financing useless capital investments. Instead of giving ordinary Chinese people the financial means to assert their material wants and needs — and then enabling investment to flow into enterprises that fulfill those mass desires — China is building housing developments in cities without people.

In the U.S., the supply-side model has produced similar (if less egregious) imbalances. Before the coronavirus pandemic, record-high corporate profits coincided with aberrantly low business investment. As Republican Senator Marco Rubio lamented last year, America’s “nonfinancial corporate business sector routinely spends more on buying financial assets than on capital development.” Many factors have contributed to this outcome. But the fact that America’s ultrarich have commandeered the bulk of the past four decades of income growth is surely one.

The income distribution depicted above was a choice. With strong labor rights, high minimum wages, and more post-tax redistribution, the bottom 90 percent of U.S. households could have seen their incomes rise steadily over the past half-century. In that world, the typical American family would have less debt and more disposable income. And that mass purchasing power would allow the economy to support a wider array of businesses and services.

We opted for a different path. The U.S. slashed taxes on the wealthy, undermined unions, and let its social safety net remain exceptionally threadbare. As a result, America’s economic elites ended up with more income than they could spend or profitably invest in productive enterprises. So, they bid up the price of urban real estate, and bankrolled the development of socially useless financial innovation. Instead of directing the gains of growth toward better meeting the wants and needs of ordinary Americans, we built 1,000-foot towers full of perpetually empty luxury apartments that Russian criminals could use for money laundering.

This is a suboptimal way to run a country, in my opinion. But until recently, in cities where America’s affluent and Über-rich are heavily concentrated, the top-heavy economy was at least able to support a robust service sector. The rich may spend a much lower percentage of their income than the poor and middle class. But America’s rich still spend quite a lot. And if you pack enough rich people into a single stretch of land, they’ll generate a healthy amount of consumer demand in that area.

Alas, the COVID-19 crisis has revealed that organizing an urban economy around the conspicuous consumption of a highly mobile minority has significant downsides. During the present recession, job losses have been concentrated at the lower end of the labor market — and yet, wealthy Americans have cut their spending more sharply than working-class ones. New research from the economists Michael Stepner, Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, and John Friedman suggests that — thanks to government aid — low-income Americans’ personal spending is almost back to its prerecession level. But among high-earning households, consumption remains severely depressed.

This is ostensibly because the consumption of the affluent is more heavily geared toward the purchase of discretionary, in-person services such as fine dining and live entertainment. Since rich people do not need these things — and a pandemic has drastically reduced their appeal — they’re liable to cut their spending, even if their jobs and incomes have been unaffected by the current downturn.

Which is disastrous for the service-sector economies that exist to satisfy their whims. As the New York Times reports:

Economists at the Harvard-based research group Opportunity Insights estimate that the highest-earning quarter of Americans has been responsible for about half of the decline in consumption during this recession. And that has wreaked havoc on the lower-wage service workers on the other end of many of their transactions, the researchers say…Unemployment claims have been high in rich counties that were largely immune to the last recession. And lower-income Americans living in those richer counties have been hit particularly hard. Their spending fell further than the spending of lower-income workers in poorer counties.

… Patricia Namyalo, a server in a hotel restaurant on Capitol Hill in Washington, is gloomy about what’s ahead. She recalls when business began to dwindle in early March, before the city’s shutdown went into effect, and well before members of Congress, who sometimes dine at the hotel, recessed for the crisis…“The upper class was already aware that America was going to follow suit,” she said. “And people like myself — I didn’t quite get it at the time.”

She suspects the same is true now. Higher-income consumers know they won’t be back to their old levels of dining out or spending any time soon, even with all the talk of cities reopening. Meanwhile, lower-wage workers wait, hoping for the call back to work.

The coronavirus pandemic would have devastated the U.S. economy no matter what growth model we’d pursued since 1980. No matter how you distribute income or organize industry, a deadly, highly transmissible virus is going to be bad for business.

But the gross inequities of the modern U.S. economy have deepened the COVID-19 recession. If more of America’s economic activity were geared toward meeting the needs of the median worker — and less toward serving the whims of the typical banker — then the pandemic-induced collapse in high-end consumption would have brought fewer jobs down with it. Meanwhile, if wages had kept pace with productivity gains over the past half-century, America would have entered this crisis with a larger economy and less financially vulnerable working class.

In ordinary times, our nation’s overreliance on the investment and consumption of the fickle rich depresses growth and corrodes democracy. In this extraordinary time, it is directly immiserating millions. We can and should build a better economy, one that keeps workers afloat in all seasons — no matter how choppy the waters or low the tide.