âHold my diet coke hydorox⌠hychororo⌠hyquinedrox⌠hydrachlorine pills.â
The last few paragraphs, to give a sense of the piece:
Not provoking this perpetually provoked segment of the audience has become, for much of our news media, a higher priority than accuracy. And so theyâll avoid reporting this Bad News as Bad News.
All of which is why, I think, we havenât been permitted to grieve the deaths of more than 90,000 of our neighbors over the past several weeks. We havenât been permitted to acknowledge the weight of that. Weâre treated, instead, to news updates on the pandemic that weirdly tip-toe around the otherwise obvious fact that a pandemic that kills 90,000 of us is â objectively â Bad News. Recognizing that obvious fact would be regarded by the Perpetually Aggrieved faction as a biased, âpartisanâ attack presented only for the partisan aim of making Donald Trump â the champion of the Perpetually Aggrieved â âlook bad.â As though all that matters is dueling perceptions. As though nothing that âlooks badâ might appear so because it is, in fact, bad.
This refusal to allow public space for public mourning â media space, emotional space, head space â is throwing us all out of balance. Itâs unnerving and unsettling in the way that all such Orwellian doublespeak is. But it digs deeper, I think, because this isnât just doublespeak or doublethink, itâs double- feel . Our national grief is rising, daily, but weâre asked to ignore it, to pretend it isnât there instead of expressing it, sharing it, or sharing in it.
But ignoring that flood of Bad News wonât make it go away. Like the floodwaters behind the Enfield Dam, all that grief is going to have to go somewhere . And when it does, Iâm not sure whatâs going to happen.
The crew can wear space suits for all I care, I am still not getting on a jet powered tin can of recycled breath until there is a vaccine.
Why is my first thought whether the church is traditionally for black worshippers, or not? Something tells me this had nothing to do with the virus claims.
Also known as âthe editorsâ and âthe ownersâ.
Bio people, help me out here: it sounds like Trumpvirus is turning off the most useful parts of the immune system while making the damaging parts hyperactive? What would this mean for people with reduced immune systems or immunosuppresants?
The Lancetâs come out with this:
https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(20)31180-61Hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine with or without a macrolide for treatment of COVID-19: a multinational registry analysis
(formattingâs weird but Iâm loathe to change it in case it screws up the link)
Full PDF here I think:
https://www.thelancet.com/action/showPdf?pii=S0140-6736(20)31180-6
Lancet online article here:
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)31180-6/fulltext
(Somethingâs up with Onebox or with The LancetâI canât get the article to display its first few linesâso hereâs my clumsy workaround, sorry guys:)
Summary
Background
Hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine, often in combination with a second-generation macrolide, are being widely used for treatment of COVID-19, despite no conclusive evidence of their benefit. Although generally safe when used for approved indications such as autoimmune disease or malaria, the safety and benefit of these treatment regimens are poorly evaluated in COVID-19.
Methods
We did a multinational registry analysis of the use of hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine with or without a macrolide for treatment of COVID-19. The registry comprised data from 671 hospitals in six continents. We included patients hospitalised between Dec 20, 2019, and April 14, 2020, with a positive laboratory finding for SARS-CoV-2. Patients who received one of the treatments of interest within 48 h of diagnosis were included in one of four treatment groups (chloroquine alone, chloroquine with a macrolide, hydroxychloroquine alone, or hydroxychloroquine with a macrolide), and patients who received none of these treatments formed the control group. Patients for whom one of the treatments of interest was initiated more than 48 h after diagnosis or while they were on mechanical ventilation, as well as patients who received remdesivir, were excluded. The main outcomes of interest were in-hospital mortality and the occurrence of de-novo ventricular arrhythmias (non-sustained or sustained ventricular tachycardia or ventricular fibrillation).
Findings
96 032 patients (mean age 53¡8 years, 46¡3% women) with COVID-19 were hospitalised during the study period and met the inclusion criteria. Of these, 14 888 patients were in the treatment groups (1868 received chloroquine, 3783 received chloroquine with a macrolide, 3016 received hydroxychloroquine, and 6221 received hydroxychloroquine with a macrolide) and 81 144 patients were in the control group. 10 698 (11¡1%) patients died in hospital. After controlling for multiple confounding factors (age, sex, race or ethnicity, body-mass index, underlying cardiovascular disease and its risk factors, diabetes, underlying lung disease, smoking, immunosuppressed condition, and baseline disease severity), when compared with mortality in the control group (9¡3%), hydroxychloroquine (18¡0%; hazard ratio 1¡335, 95% CI 1¡223â1¡457), hydroxychloroquine with a macrolide (23¡8%; 1¡447, 1¡368â1¡531), chloroquine (16¡4%; 1¡365, 1¡218â1¡531), and chloroquine with a macrolide (22¡2%; 1¡368, 1¡273â1¡469) were each independently associated with an increased risk of in-hospital mortality. [tl;dr: emphasis mine] Compared with the control group (0¡3%), hydroxychloroquine (6¡1%; 2¡369, 1¡935â2¡900), hydroxychloroquine with a macrolide (8¡1%; 5¡106, 4¡106â5¡983), chloroquine (4¡3%; 3¡561, 2¡760â4¡596), and chloroquine with a macrolide (6¡5%; 4¡011, 3¡344â4¡812) were independently associated with an increased risk of de-novo ventricular arrhythmia during hospitalisation.
Interpretation
We were unable to confirm a benefit of hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine, when used alone or with a macrolide, on in-hospital outcomes for COVID-19. Each of these drug regimens was associated with decreased in-hospital survival and an increased frequency of ventricular arrhythmias when used for treatment of COVID-19.
This whole thing still feels oddly unreal. You look out of the window and thereâs nothing to see.
News reports vary constantly, opinions shift, the whole thing happening at a distance.
First we were desensitized by watching wars on television, now we get to watch a pandemic unfold but mostly at a distance.
The numbers âdonât feel rightâ yet I have no doubt theyâre true and most likely under-reported.
As humans weâre used to socialising and caring for small groups, like friends and family, but I donât think any of us knows quite how to deal with a loss on this scale that hurts us all in so many ways.
Thanks for posting this. I expect further info on that next Tuesday from the interview podcast with Drosten. I just caught up with last Tuesdayâs podcast, in which he spoke about H1N1 (aka Swine Flu of 2009) when antibody cross reaction with previous strains of influenza (which had been understandably overlooked when the pandemic started) saved out asses.
I do not think SARS crossreactions will be widespread, but I am naive enough to hope that this might help to shorten vaccine development time. A SARS vaccine would have been developed if capitalismâs âyeah, not going to make money out of thisâ attitude wouldnât have kicked it out of the pipelines a couple of years ago.
Letâs all just hope this helps,for a while, ok? Until someone sinks the idea, that is.
Anyone here need a good cry? I just watched this.
Donât say I didnât warn you.
Gutted.
Just gutted.
âIf you look at the one survey, the only bad surveyâŚ" Trump told reporters
The fact that Trump thinks medications are approved by surveying people says about everything you need to know about his medical acumen.
âThis week hydroxychloroquine is number one with a bullet!â
Hereâs something new to worry about catching in a deep south strip club
âLikeâ isnât really the right button. 
I would think the better money is in using your meth shipment to smuggle in bottles of hand sanitizer.
whenever a non-scientific expert such as me criticises the Swedish strategy, the response has often been that I am not an expert.
Seriously: I whish that would be the case in Germany, where one of the worlds most eminent experts on Corona viruses is getting death threats because he is perceived (NB!) to be the cause of measures. (Narrator: he isnât even asked, and while having been asked for his expertise at some point, this did not concern the measures taken.)
While the article has important points on groups at risk not being in the focus of media attention (to say it neutrally), I have the feeling the rest is just a bit hapless. But then, I am not living in Sweden.
