Analysis of current economic conditions and policy
GDP Forecasts (updated 3/21)
Into recession
Update, 3/21: GS predicts 24% decline in 2020Q2, where output would be 1.24% below 2017Q1 levels (in logs). IHS MarkIt formerly Macroeconomic Advisers forecasts 12.6% decline (annualized) in Q2.
66 thoughts on “GDP Forecasts (updated 3/21)”
Not Trampis
Let us get fair dinkum. No-one knows when but it wil loccur
pgl
Remember that claim from Bruce Hall and Donald Trump that the anti-malaria drug was a very effective cure for COVID-19. What did Anthony Fauci say?
The irony is that the people who say not enough is being done are the same people denigrating those who are actually attempting to get things done. Perfection is the enemy of good.
Hydroxychloroquine, a medicine for malaria that President Donald Trump has touted as a treatment for coronavirus, was no more effective than conventional care, a small study found.
The report published by the Journal of Zhejiang University in China showed that patients who got the medicine didn’t fight off the new coronavirus more often than those who did not get the medicine.
Dave
There is something wrong with Bruce Hall. He thinks that watching a youtube video makes him an expert on proper clinical trial design and clinical data analysis. Dementia?
Steven Kopits
Fauci does not say it doesn’t work, only that the evidence is anecdotal. They are testing it now.
Come on Steve. I never said these potential treatments do not work. But if you bother to follow the BS Bruce Hall is peddling, he is acting like this treatment is a proven success. You know it’s not so maybe you can be forgiven for just skipping Bruce’s worthless rants.
‘Overall, however, some biotech experts say there’s some reason for optimism that the drug can help. “You wouldn’t see qualified medical professionals from China, France and Korea looking into this if there wasn’t something to it,” Bailey said.’
” “You wouldn’t see qualified medical professionals from China, France and Korea looking into this if there wasn’t something to it,” Bailey said.’”
Prof. Drosten has made some statements in respect to the French study design and conclusions one could draw if one is expert for Corona virus.
Forget the hype.
Steven Kopits
How about these guys?
Dr. Colyer is a practicing physician and chairman of the National Advisory Commission on Rural Health. He served as governor of Kansas, 2018-19. Dr. Hinthorn is director of the Division of Infectious Disease at the University of Kansas Medical Center.
“…researchers in France treated a small number of patients with both hydroxychloroquine and a Z-Pak (azithromycin), and 100% of them were cured by day six of treatment. Compare that with 57.1% of patients treated with hydroxychloroquine alone, and 12.5% of patients who received neither.”
Obviously, n is small. But I think it would be early to write off these therapies.
“I think it would be early to write off these therapies.”
Of course NO ONE is saying do not do the clinical trials. But of course our self styled “expert” on everything has to claim someone is writing these potential treatments. Hey Stevie – ever wondered why NO ONE likes you? It is because of such pathetic stupid and yet arrogant statements.
Ulenspiegel
“Obviously, n is small. But I think it would be early to write off these therapies.”
The selection of the two patient groups was not good, and testing only the virus in the throat was also weak…..
The SAME results could have happen even without any drugs….
pgl
“Elon Musk and President Trump have both touted the drug on social media.”
Musk is an interesting person anyone who takes medical advice from one of his tweets is even dumber than Donald Trump. Leave it to our self styled expert at everything to lean on a fluff piece. But the next bullet point is OK:
“The early data is promising, scientists and biotech experts say. But there are still many unknowns.”
Early data with many unknowns – HELLO? What part of that do you morons not get?
pgl
“3 million tablets of the drug Resochin, or chloroquine phosphate, to U.S. patients.” A lot of testing!
“Neither drug is currently approved by the FDA to treat the coronavirus. So it is important “not to provide false hope,” FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn said at the White House’s daily press briefing.”
Trump has mental midgits like Bruce Hall believing these treatments have been approved by the FDA. Trump lied.
Now read carefully:
But we’re still far from having an approved treatment for COVID-19, and the evidence behind chloroquine is not firm.
As Bailey points out, there is no data yet from a randomized clinical trial, which is considered the gold standard to minimize the possibility of bias in the findings. One of the biggest problems, scientists say, is that the tests have not been blinded. If physicians have prior knowledge of the intervention, that might influence how to treat the patient. That introduces other variables that are hard to separate from the effect of the drug. There’s also further work needed to understand whether the drug reduces hospital time and mortality rates, and whether it impacts ventilation use. There are also some big unknowns about when, how and to whom the drug should be administered. “What I don’t know, and I don’t think anyone knows is the degree of anti-viral activity and if it can be used to treat the most critical patients,” said Olson. “We still also don’t understand the optimal dose treatment for covid-19, and whether it might be used at a lower dose for prophylaxis (meaning to take preventatively) than for treatment.”As Olson points out, there are still side effects, like nausea and vision issues, and it remains to be seen whether the drug will be tolerated well in very sick patients. Furthermore, overdosing on the drug in high doses can cause serious health outcomes.
Bruce Hall
Don’t need a chart to realize the economic shutdown from the fear of this virus; we can simply look around.
Doctor Grace, an oncologist at Lennox Hill Hospital in Manhattan, was on The Ingraham Angle again last night to explain the uses of hydroxychloroquine, why it works, and how it has saved the lives of his patients. He is treating over 100 patients with the coronavirus and none have died.
Meanwhile, let’s see if this doctor’s experience with his patients who were 100% free of Covid-19 after five days of treatment get any attention. https://www.independentsentinel.com/dr-grace-explains-why-hydroxychloroquines-success-is-real/? He has treated his patients a combination of hydroxychloroquine (which President Trump wants quickly approved for Covid-19 treatment) and Azithromycin. The combination counterintuitively somewhat suppresses the immune response in elderly patients who are most likely to die… because their immune reaction is too strong to the virus and causes a “cytokine storm”, the actual cause of lung complications and death.
Most infected people don’t need such medical attention and could resume normal activities, if this doctor is correct, turning the economy around again.
Hydroxychloroquine, a medicine for malaria that President Donald Trump has touted as a treatment for coronavirus, was no more effective than conventional care, a small study found.
The report published by the Journal of Zhejiang University in China showed that patients who got the medicine didn’t fight off the new coronavirus more often than those who did not get the medicine.
2slugbaits
Bruce Hall Laura Ingraham has a history of putting quacks and frauds on air. You might want to check into this Doctor Grace. It’s not a pretty story. And you should have been immediately suspicious of someone who presents himself as an oncologist (and one who recommends exercise and diet as a cure for cancer!!!) but yet is delving into COVID-19, which is respiratory and pulmonary. Wake-up. You’ve been played again.
So, when doctors from around the world are saying you have a solution and you decide that maybe two more years of study is necessary, whose fault is it that critically ill people are dying? If I were a conspiracist, I’d think that there are those who really want a health and economic catastrophe in order to blame it on a certain person. But that would be unreasonable, right?
Hydroxychloroquine, a medicine for malaria that President Donald Trump has touted as a treatment for coronavirus, was no more effective than conventional care, a small study found.
The report published by the Journal of Zhejiang University in China showed that patients who got the medicine didn’t fight off the new coronavirus more often than those who did not get the medicine.
Moses Herzog
@ Menzie
Menzie, I wanna make it clear, I’m leaning very strongly towards your side on this issue (that phase 3 and safety precautions should be taken before introducing drugs ( especially combinations ) to large numbers of COVID-19 patients). However, you know some are going to give you flack over the N=30 deal. Bro, just saying…..
I still think Vitamin D might play a bigger role than people are perceiving—as a “defense” , not for immunity from the virus. I am sure some people are getting hearty laughs out of that one, but I just feel there’s something there—similar to my “recession before end of July” thing. You know, you just get that feeling in your gut about some things. Surely even highly educated people of an ethnicity that exhibits a love of gambling, would identify to a degree with trusting your gut sometimes?? Even if their career path and level of professionalism demands focusing on empirical data.
2slugbaits
Bruce Hall Swept under the rug??? The study was published by the US government and is publicly available. Even you were able to find it. In what sense is that sweeping something under the rug? But note that the study was based on SARS-CoV and not SARS-CoV-2 (a.k.a. COVID-19). Tests were on animals, not humans. That 2005 study simply showed that Chloroquine was a promising treatment for SARS viruses. That has never been in dispute. But promising is a lot different than promised. The evidence so far is very mixed. The French results were ambiguous at best. Expanding trials to NYC is fine, but you shouldn’t delude yourself into thinking that Chloroquine will make the problem go away. People in general and older people in particular have a tendency to look for and believe in miracle cures. But that’s not how medicine works. One treatment makes a marginal improvement here and another treatment makes a marginal improvement there. You should not expect big leaps in survival rates from any treatment. That’s why you need rigorous clinical trials. You have to be able tease out the difference between random improvements that would have happened without any treatment and improvements that were truly attributable to the treatment. I’m afraid that your gullibility and willingness to buy into any and every claim to make the COVID-19 pandemic go away is just symptomatic of someone your age. Young people tend to believe they are immortal. Older folks tend to fall victim to false hope. It’s always been so. I suggest you turn off Fox Noise.
Willie
If Trump and Musk say it works, well golly there, you just know it works great right away without testing! I am so please to be informed ot this that I will run 20 red lights in their honor.
Willie
I may have to revise my opinion that this will not be as bad as 2008-2010. I sure hope it is not as bad as it could be.
Alan Goldhammer
I spent 90% of my work career in the biopharma industry and retired almost 10 years ago. I have been tracking drug/vaccine/diagnostic trials and development. There are a very large number of pre-prints coming out on COVID-19 these days. About half of what I am reading are from various groups in Hubei province where this all started. I am not sanguine (and hope to be proven wrong) about a small molecule treatment for this virus. One main trial in China on an HIV anti-viral failed and those data have already been published. I would add that I am not putting any faith at all in small trials that get reported in newspapers. the real problem is the lack of proven therapies for the critically ill. One antiviral studied in China appears to be 70% effective in treating mild cases of infection. Favipiravir is approved in Japan for seasonal influenza and might be useful as a first line treatment when symptoms first appear. However, we don’t have any definitive clinical trials demonstrating this. The largest trials right now for critically ill are cytokine inhibitors with the Roche drug, tocilizumab, showing some preliminary evidence in Chinese trials. there is now a 24 site Phase II trial starting in Italy where they really need something to work. Researchers are publishing data as quickly as they are able to.
Remdesivir is in trials all over the world and data should be coming in. This Gilead drug is has some difficult synthetic chemistry and how fast it could be produced at scale is uncertain (assuming it works). IMO, the best approach for the critically ill is an antibody treatment against the virus. Ideally, monoclonal antibody therapy is best as it can be scaled up. However, purification of antibodies from recovered patients is an option BUT only small amounts of antibody can be produced in this way.
there are only two vaccines in trials, both of which are gene based and have never been tried in humans to this point. There was a failure in imagination following the Zika virus outbreak of a couple of years ago where a number of vaccine platforms were developed. Some were tested in humans and other were not. The vaccine industry is stepping up to the plate right now but it’s going to take time to assess potency and more important safety. I don’t think we want to see a safety problem such as the one that occurred during the Swine Flu vaccine use in the late 1970s.
I’ll try to post findings here as they come in. Anything that is not part of a well designed trial can probably be disregarded unless you still think that Laetrile is a useful cancer drug.
pgl
A very thoughtful and informative review of the evidence so far. I would suggest people read your reviews and just ignore the misleading cheerleading from people like Trump and his Minnie Me Bruce Hall.
Alan Goldhammer
Thanks. For those of you mathematically inclined and into modeling here is an interesting paper from a Greek/Italian group that models the Lombardy infection by predicting day Zero and they extrapolating to when they expect it to fade out: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.17.20037689v1.full.pdf The math is a little to dense for me but their conclusion is that new cases should fade away by the end of May as of the “lock down” date of March 8.
Moses Herzog
@ Mr. Goldhammer
I wish to second pgl’s sentiments.
Both of your comments are the true gems that 98% of newspapers can only opine to. When David Brooks gets condescending about blogs and the people it attracts, I wish to have a large arrow pointing to exemplary comments such as your two comments above. Blogs often outrank newspapers as far as true substance and content—your contributions in this thread are an example of that. You are part of the “mostly quiet” majority of readers that Menzie’s and Jim’s writings attract. I hope you will not be shy in sharing thoughts with Menzie and Professor Hamilton’s readers as the COVID-19 saga continues.
I’m gonna be honest and say I haven’t watched this to the end, but the beginning seemed to be so well done, it’s hard for me to imagine the rest of it to the end is not quite good.
This model assumed a 90% reduction in the transmission rate due to the lockdown, with no real data to support that. Also, their transmission rate estimate was on the order of 4, very roughly twice what I’ve seen from other researchers. I wouldn’t put much faith in that…
Moses Herzog
Beijing says it’s all gone, except for those dirty Laowai that keep “reintroducing” it. So I have all the evidence I need on the success of Lockdowns. You know, because they’re so “offended” by how they get treated by western countries, we know they’re very sensitive and self-conscious to this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebanS7YL6V4
“Does anyone know what happened to Grandma Zhang???” “Hmmm, well, she hasn’t been back to the apartment since she got Meiguo Sex Lung Disease that started in Wuhan.” [Awkward silence as they try figure out which family relative might turn them in to authorities if they provide further explanation] “Speaking of which, when are you returning my illegal copy of Windows 10??”
pgl
For those who may not have gotten the line about laetrile:
thanks for the update alan. i am not optimistic of any therapeutic to help in the near term. if this lingers into the fall, hopefully we get some support from these therapies. i have had hopes for remdesivir, as well as favipiravir. however, your comments seem to suggest the japanese drug is more effective at healing the less severe more quickly, than assisting with those in a very dangerous condition. i was hoping for a more promising outcome for the very ill. got giving up hope yet, just not as promising as i had hoped.
Ulenspiegel
“IMO, the best approach for the critically ill is an antibody treatment against the virus. Ideally, monoclonal antibody therapy is best as it can be scaled up. However, purification of antibodies from recovered patients is an option BUT only small amounts of antibody can be produced in this way.”
That is the opinion of Drosten too.
Willie
Thank you. This is enlightening, if a little disconcerting.
Insider?
Thank you for the very thoughtful post. I suspect Trump is being updated on the 250 patients getting compassionate use treatment of remdesivir, and the clinical trials using the drug that began in Feb in China. I know we are not privy to that data, but he surely is. And yes, it may not be a complete picture, but it surely would be valuable to understand.
That’s not a defense of his politics, handling of the epidemic, boisterous nature, science, or hairstyle. It is simply an acknowledgment that he has a view of critical information that we do not.
Mass General treatment guidelines recommend “considering” Chloroquine for treatment of hospitalized cases. My doctor friends opine that Fauci is downplaying it to prevent uninfected and the infected but minimally symptomatic from demanding it, reserving it for the cases that truly need it. Menzie, love your posts, please keep it up
pgl
Bayer is producing a lot of this alleged miracle cure for COVID-19 so if the market thought it was about to be that “game changer” Trump claimed, Bayer’s stock should be soaring. Let’s take a look:
Stock price has declined from $21 in early February to only $13 now.
Of course Bruce Hall is more worried about making his killing in the stock market than how many people have been killed by COVID-19 so he brags about investing in this stuff. I can only imagine how much Brucie Boy has lost on his own stupidity!
baffling
bruce claims to have cash on hand to make his killing. but if he has significant cash on hand, that means he missed out on the past 10 years of a major bull market. not exactly credible for a guy giving investment advice. and if he says he market timed and pulled out? apparently his actions were not inline with his advice that this was just the flu, and will also pass. overall i would not take much investing advice from bruce. even if he has cash, i doubt he puts it to action at the appropriate time.
Edward Hanson
Rather than just predict the obvious recession due to the consequences of the pandemic, perhaps it would be more educational to predict the outcome of government action, federal and state, as to stopping, retarding or exasperation the recession. The details are scant, but will it work?
Ed
AS
Below is a link to an LA Times article summarizing where we are related to drugs that may be useful to abate Coronavirus, Covid-19
Question for the experts: Will quantum computers increase the speed of finding useful drugs to impede or cure virus infections. Given the impact on the world economy from Coronavirus , if quantum computers would significantly increase the speed of drug development, maybe development of quantum computers should be a modern, “Manhattan Project”.
baffling
AS, for this to happen, you need more people knowledgable about writing quantum code. this may be a greater barrier than the development of a physical system. and it will probably occur through a machine learning approach using quantum. this will still require a large database of the chemical and biological experiments. i agree this is a promising path, but even with a modern manhattan project in quantum, your end goal is still quite some time away.
AS
Thanks for the input.
How long do you think is “some time away”?
Moses Herzog
“Wired” magazine is a pretty good source for Quantum stuff, at least beginners. I’m sure there’s better ones to get deeper into it,
baffling
currently we have systems capable of running around 50 qbits. to solve simple real world problems, i would guess we need somewhere in the area of 1000 qbits. this will take years to develop. and full service quantum computers probably need hundreds of thousands or millions of qbits to be effective. my gut feeling is when the technology can get us over 1000, it probably scales to those larger numbers. optimistically this gets done in the next decade, maybe five years. but coding and taking advantage of these quantum systems is where we will have a problem-it requires much more skill than typical coding. it requires a completely different way of thining about the problems. there are very few people, today, who are capable of doing this. i am not optimistic we will have many in the next 10 years either. unless your “manhattan project” idea includes both the hardware and the software. the software will basically come down to throwing a bunch of junk on the wall and see what sticks. if what sticks has great value, this pays off. if it does not have great value…
Alan Goldhammer
There is no need for quantum computing as lots of work has been done over the past decade to refine search algorithms for promising drugs. There was an article in last week’s New York times on a CA group that was doing just this based on some of the predicted protein interactions of COVID-19. the forwarded their information to a group at Mount Sinai in NYC who have the capability of doing in vitro viral inhibition studies. The pre-print of this came on line today and they identified 69 compounds that are either approved drugs or have been in clinical studies for some other condition. this is perhaps the most comprehensive paper to appear but I’ve seen maybe 6-8 other papers that had lower numbers of potential drugs. I remember taking medicinal chemistry back in 1969 and would have never predicted that we would be able to do stuff this fast!
The big question right now is getting things into clinical trials ASAP so that data can be acquired quickly. We also need to show that chloroquine or hydroxychloroquin with and without azithromycin (a common antibiotic that may play a role here) work in clinical settings and for which patients. It may be these are only useful in non-critical care patients; we really do not know right now.
AS
Thanks for the update.
What I was also wondering is if quantum computers could model clinical trials without the need for human subjects, perhaps by modeling the drug, human DNA and the virus DNA reactions.
I saw a news program in which a company president mentioned that the company had modeled a drug for Coronavirus from the DNA of the virus posted by Chinese scientists shortly after the outbreak. This may be the same CA company you mention. I can’t remember the name of the company.
baffling
“What I was also wondering is if quantum computers could model clinical trials without the need for human subjects, perhaps by modeling the drug, human DNA and the virus DNA reactions.”
no. not in the near future, will this be possible. requires too many qbits.
When Fox News’ John Roberts asked Mnuchin whether we’re in a recession amid the coronavirus outbreak, Mnuchin responded that’s “a technical question” and is “not terribly relevant” in this situation. “Are we going to have reduced economic activity this quarter? Absolutely,” Mnuchin said. “I think, next quarter, a lot depends on how quickly the curve of the medical situation works. When people focus on recessions, it’s normally because of prolonged economic environment.”
I can only imagine what this overpaid clown meant by prolonged economic environment bu!t to him the suffering the average person is about to endure is not relevant to him as well as he and his corrupt buddies in the White House can keep ripping the rest of us off for another 4 plus years. Now that would be a prolonged economic environment.
lee
Looking forward to Dr. Trump next recommending bleeding and leeches.
pgl
He is a really smart guy – so yea!
Moses Herzog
The orange creature’s favorite word in the Sunday, March 22 press conference is “pent up demand”. I’m trying to imagine the look on Menzie’s, Prof Hamilton’s, and every other PhD economist’s face every time he says “pent up demand”. Aside from all the great polaroid moments that would make, it would also make a nice drinking game.
Folks, as a personal aside. I spilled half a cup of “Venom” Cherry Lime energy drink on my keyboard. It still works, and the only thing I notice is my space key doesn’t have the “free give” to it as it did before (Gee, I wonder why??). I keep thinking there must be an electric short in it I haven’t noticed yet, but not yet. Cross your fingers for me.
macroduck
What matters, of course, is effective demand.
Any policy aimed at maintaining income aims to maintain effective demand, but some such policies will work better than others. Slush funds aimed at preserving corporate income might do some good, but if the aim is to preserve effective demand, then the ideal recipient is someone who will spend all of the money offered by the government. Households which have lost income are unlikely to save much of a benefit check. Firms which face reduced demand will save until demand is restored. The choice seems pretty obvious.
2slugbaits
Trump reverting to the mean. Initially Trump was in denial and didn’t want to hear anything that wasn’t a good news story. Trump told us that this was all just a Democratic hoax. We also heard how it would “miraculously” wash away. We saw the Trump that we all knew…well, all of us except the usual MAGA cheerleaders. He was an incompetent bungler who got by with happy talk and adjectives in the superlative. A con man. A used car dealer. Precious time was lost because Trump couldn’t get past his ego. On a scale of 1 to 10, he earned something like a 1 or a 2 (at best). Then last Monday he seemed to get his act together. Another good effort on Tuesday. And another good effort on Wednesday. I was surprised and started to feel a little reassured. He earned a 7 or 8. And then with Thursday’s briefing he reverted to form. It was one of the most irresponsible press conferences I’ve ever heard. Friday was another disaster. It was another Trump Show where experts had to genuflect before the Great Leader. Each speaker had to flatter Trump, but only after Trump droned on endlessly flattering himself. And his press conferences over the weekend set new lows in competence and transparency. A lot of people are going to die because gullible people like Bruce and CoRev and Peak Trader and sammy voted for this clown show.
Barkley Rosser
And there was no Dr. Fauci there today. So he started out not too badly as long as he just read announcements of stuff shipped and National Guard getting called up, but then when answering questions he was back to berating reporters for supposedly “nasty questions,” with him sneering at word Romney is self-quaranting, and then this astounding performance where he complained repeatedly about having spent or lst “billions of dollars” because he ran for president. Sheesh. No wonder the markets were reportedly dropping like flies during this performance: the president who opens his mouth and the markets drop.
Moses Herzog
I kept wondering how long Fauci would last going to those pressers, and was only half watching today’s (Sunday’s). Towards the very end of the presser I wondered to myself (“Was Fauci there and I missed it??”). I see it as a HUGE red flag for how things are going on behind the scenes with how the administration is handling things. Fauci is very self-aware of his public image and what he views as his “legacy”. One missed presser by Fauci is not a big deal. Let’s say Fauci misses 7/10 of these pressers in the next 10 days—that’s a telegraph message to everyone that there’s near screaming sessions going on behind closed doors between Fauci and say—-Pence and Navarro. In my opinion that’s a good way to read the tea leaves on how bad the clusterF*ck is behind the scenes.
Not Trampis
I think you ( and my country) is looking at a depression in other words a drop in output of over 10%.
This happens when you close most businesses down.
joseph
Steven Kopits: “researchers in France treated a small number of patients with both hydroxychloroquine and a Z-Pak (azithromycin)”
Hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin are a dangerous combination of drugs that can cause ventricular fibrillation and cardiac arrest.
But hey, the Medical Genius in Chief has a good feeling about it so it’s probably okay.
Anything which causes heart arrhythmia and/or rapid heartbeat is also apt to drastically increase the chances of cardiac arrest. “Princeton”Steve, have you acquired an inability to google topics which make you look like an A$$ ?? Otherwise known as “Barkley’s Syndrome”??
baffling
just as a followup, data just out of china suggests a fifth of the folks who died there had heart damage. the thinking is that the virus is causing damage to the heart, or may actually cause a heart attack itself. they are seeing myocardial injury in the folks who died, i have not heard about any results related to survivors. so steven, there is definitely risk in providing a drug that could actually enhance this factor, especially in the elderly. this could be why it works better on the young and/or healthy.
Moses Herzog
@baffling
I have very minimal medical knowledge, pretty much the same as any random guy you would grab off the street. But after delving semi-deep into the limited knowledge of the COVID-19, my semi-educated guess is, the heart damage occurs in the very very late stages of the effects of the virus. So, as far as the virus, I don’t think the virus itself is causing the damage to the heart—but rather the latter stage symptoms giving cause to other latter stage symptoms—the heart, which will cause death. The main thing it is hitting is your lungs. Then when your lungs start having a harder time transporting oxygen from the alveoli into your blood system (because the alveoli get damaged and/or (mostly AND) the gas composition in your lungs becomes more and more “jumbled”, then your respiration increases, and your heart has go into “double-time” (heh, definitely a non-technical term there) to make up for the low oxygen levels in your blood—-and then you’re more apt to have heart failure due to the over-working of the heart.
There’s a decent chance I got some of that wrong, so if any medical professional wants to correct me, I’d be more than happy to be corrected. this is obviously a simplified and abbreviated version of what can/does happen
I want to add as an addendum for some of you who want to get tests but don’t deserve the tests. If your temp is not above 100.4 (and even then maybe) please don’t waste medical professionals’ time and PPEs on a negative test. And how much do you want to bet hundreds of people with a temp below 100.4 have wasted tests and medical professionals’ time now?? I sure as hell would be willing to bet on it.
baffling
” the heart damage occurs in the very very late stages of the effects of the virus. So, as far as the virus, I don’t think the virus itself is causing the damage to the heart”
this is probably true, although we do not have any data to clarify the issue (at least not available to me). the important issue is that it is dangerous to promote remedies that could really be ineffectual, or dangerous, without proper knowledge. a drug that causes heart arrhythmia in a patient with myocardial injury is dangerous to promote to people who may have that exact problem! and it is quite possible the drug is perfectly safe for others without that problem, but who would otherwise recover from the virus without the new miracle drug. this is why the medical community is so upset with dr trump promoting these drugs like a snake oil salesman. only large clinical trials will give us the answer. trump is simply promoting confusion here.
“I want to add as an addendum for some of you who want to get tests but don’t deserve the tests.”
if we ever get to the point where we can actually conduct large number of tests, this will change. because we will need to know who has/not been exposed if we want to recover quickly. this needs to occur in a nearer time frame than our administration has currently charted. if trump wants to open up by easter, he needs to get off his ass and get this stuff done, pronto.
as a side note, i am tired of trump blaming bush and obama for an “obsolete” response system. what has trump been doing for the past 3 years? maybe spending less time on the golf course and more time planning for emergency contingencies would be a start.
pgl
Interesting job posting from Gilead Sciences:
Medical Information Manager (Remdesivir/Covid-19)
posted by ISR RECRUITMENT LIMITED
Full Time Uxbridge, Greater London £300,000 – £400,000 / year
Job Description
Medical Information Manager (Remdesivir/Covid-19)
* Stockley Park, Uxbridge
* 12 month contract
* £300 to £400 per day
The Opportunity:
We are currently looking for an experienced Medical Information Manager to help our client (a global Pharmaceutical company) to support activities against the spread of Remdesivir/Covid-19 across the ACE (Australia, Canada, and Europe) region.
You will work to provide Medical Information Vendors with the tools they need to deliver accurate advice and information to the public during this pandemic.
Skills and Experience:
* 3 years’ plus working in Medical Information in the Pharmaceutical Industry
* Experience working with Medical Information Vendors (e.g. physicians, pharmacists, nurses and NHS managers)
* Abe to deliver multiple projects in a fast-paced, cross-functional environment
* Education: Degree qualified in Pharmacy or relevant Life Sciences
Role and Responsibilities:
* Ensure that medical information vendors have access to the appropriate information to give accurate advice to patients
* Provide resources to enable training of vendor staff to ensure that the vendor service meets expected standards
* Deal with new information from finding on Remdesivir/Covid-19 and implement process improvements
* Work closely with both affiliates and vendors to improve base standards and ensure inspection readiness
Applications:
To learn and understand more about this role working as a Medical Information Manager based in West London; please contact James Sample here at ISR Recruitment or please share a copy of your CV or online business profile for a call back in the strictest confidence
Reference Number
211911423
Moses Herzog
I thought this was a nice story, so I wanted to share it. Oklahoma is a low income per capita state, that has gotten no federal matching funds for the Affordable Care Act, so I wanna say $17,000 is no small thing in the state of Oklahoma. They said they will continue on working to get MORE supplies for local hospitals, in continuum, for as long as local hospitals were requesting it.: https://www.koco.com/article/chinese-community-raises-dollar17000-to-buy-masks-supplies-for-metro-hospitals/31920142#
With the possible exception of the local Jewish community, I am unaware of any other ethnic group offering this kind of support for the complications related to COVID-19 in the state of Oklahoma.
Let us get fair dinkum. No-one knows when but it wil loccur
Remember that claim from Bruce Hall and Donald Trump that the anti-malaria drug was a very effective cure for COVID-19. What did Anthony Fauci say?
https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/politics/100000007046134/trump-fauci.html
Anecdotal evidence
!
Italy reported over 600 deaths in the last 24 hours. In Bruce Hall’s world – no big deal.
On the current post – the GS forecast looks optimistic by comparison.
pgl, I’m going to enjoy watching you eating crow: https://youtu.be/NC7k9br5SrE … and … https://youtu.be/2Zm3jyY7eiQ
The irony is that the people who say not enough is being done are the same people denigrating those who are actually attempting to get things done. Perfection is the enemy of good.
Bruce Hall: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-25/hydroxychloroquine-no-better-than-regular-covid-19-care-in-study
There is something wrong with Bruce Hall. He thinks that watching a youtube video makes him an expert on proper clinical trial design and clinical data analysis. Dementia?
Fauci does not say it doesn’t work, only that the evidence is anecdotal. They are testing it now.
Remdesvir is also showing promise as a therapy.
https://nypost.com/2020/03/20/coronavirus-in-washington-state-patient-says-ebola-drug-saved-his-life/
Come on Steve. I never said these potential treatments do not work. But if you bother to follow the BS Bruce Hall is peddling, he is acting like this treatment is a proven success. You know it’s not so maybe you can be forgiven for just skipping Bruce’s worthless rants.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32074550
‘Overall, however, some biotech experts say there’s some reason for optimism that the drug can help. “You wouldn’t see qualified medical professionals from China, France and Korea looking into this if there wasn’t something to it,” Bailey said.’
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/19/what-is-chloroquine-trump-and-elon-musk-have-touted-for-coronavirus.html
” “You wouldn’t see qualified medical professionals from China, France and Korea looking into this if there wasn’t something to it,” Bailey said.’”
Prof. Drosten has made some statements in respect to the French study design and conclusions one could draw if one is expert for Corona virus.
Forget the hype.
How about these guys?
Dr. Colyer is a practicing physician and chairman of the National Advisory Commission on Rural Health. He served as governor of Kansas, 2018-19. Dr. Hinthorn is director of the Division of Infectious Disease at the University of Kansas Medical Center.
“…researchers in France treated a small number of patients with both hydroxychloroquine and a Z-Pak (azithromycin), and 100% of them were cured by day six of treatment. Compare that with 57.1% of patients treated with hydroxychloroquine alone, and 12.5% of patients who received neither.”
Obviously, n is small. But I think it would be early to write off these therapies.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/these-drugs-are-helping-our-coronavirus-patients-11584899438?mod=hp_opin_pos_3
“I think it would be early to write off these therapies.”
Of course NO ONE is saying do not do the clinical trials. But of course our self styled “expert” on everything has to claim someone is writing these potential treatments. Hey Stevie – ever wondered why NO ONE likes you? It is because of such pathetic stupid and yet arrogant statements.
“Obviously, n is small. But I think it would be early to write off these therapies.”
The selection of the two patient groups was not good, and testing only the virus in the throat was also weak…..
The SAME results could have happen even without any drugs….
“Elon Musk and President Trump have both touted the drug on social media.”
Musk is an interesting person anyone who takes medical advice from one of his tweets is even dumber than Donald Trump. Leave it to our self styled expert at everything to lean on a fluff piece. But the next bullet point is OK:
“The early data is promising, scientists and biotech experts say. But there are still many unknowns.”
Early data with many unknowns – HELLO? What part of that do you morons not get?
“3 million tablets of the drug Resochin, or chloroquine phosphate, to U.S. patients.” A lot of testing!
“Neither drug is currently approved by the FDA to treat the coronavirus. So it is important “not to provide false hope,” FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn said at the White House’s daily press briefing.”
Trump has mental midgits like Bruce Hall believing these treatments have been approved by the FDA. Trump lied.
Now read carefully:
But we’re still far from having an approved treatment for COVID-19, and the evidence behind chloroquine is not firm.
As Bailey points out, there is no data yet from a randomized clinical trial, which is considered the gold standard to minimize the possibility of bias in the findings. One of the biggest problems, scientists say, is that the tests have not been blinded. If physicians have prior knowledge of the intervention, that might influence how to treat the patient. That introduces other variables that are hard to separate from the effect of the drug. There’s also further work needed to understand whether the drug reduces hospital time and mortality rates, and whether it impacts ventilation use. There are also some big unknowns about when, how and to whom the drug should be administered. “What I don’t know, and I don’t think anyone knows is the degree of anti-viral activity and if it can be used to treat the most critical patients,” said Olson. “We still also don’t understand the optimal dose treatment for covid-19, and whether it might be used at a lower dose for prophylaxis (meaning to take preventatively) than for treatment.”As Olson points out, there are still side effects, like nausea and vision issues, and it remains to be seen whether the drug will be tolerated well in very sick patients. Furthermore, overdosing on the drug in high doses can cause serious health outcomes.
Don’t need a chart to realize the economic shutdown from the fear of this virus; we can simply look around.
Meanwhile, let’s see if this doctor’s experience with his patients who were 100% free of Covid-19 after five days of treatment get any attention. https://www.independentsentinel.com/dr-grace-explains-why-hydroxychloroquines-success-is-real/? He has treated his patients a combination of hydroxychloroquine (which President Trump wants quickly approved for Covid-19 treatment) and Azithromycin. The combination counterintuitively somewhat suppresses the immune response in elderly patients who are most likely to die… because their immune reaction is too strong to the virus and causes a “cytokine storm”, the actual cause of lung complications and death.
Most infected people don’t need such medical attention and could resume normal activities, if this doctor is correct, turning the economy around again.
Bruce Hall: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-25/hydroxychloroquine-no-better-than-regular-covid-19-care-in-study
Bruce Hall Laura Ingraham has a history of putting quacks and frauds on air. You might want to check into this Doctor Grace. It’s not a pretty story. And you should have been immediately suspicious of someone who presents himself as an oncologist (and one who recommends exercise and diet as a cure for cancer!!!) but yet is delving into COVID-19, which is respiratory and pulmonary. Wake-up. You’ve been played again.
Government often has critical information that gets swept under the rug by the bureaucracy. Note the date; note the type of virus: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1232869/
So, when doctors from around the world are saying you have a solution and you decide that maybe two more years of study is necessary, whose fault is it that critically ill people are dying? If I were a conspiracist, I’d think that there are those who really want a health and economic catastrophe in order to blame it on a certain person. But that would be unreasonable, right?
Oh, then there’s those damned, racist Israelis: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/israeli-drug-company-donating-6-million-doses-of-malaria-drug-to-us-to-combat-coronavirus
And then there is this: https://youtu.be/Oy4AJP8nAPg
But, yeah, let’s laugh at Trump and wait a couple of years.
Bruce Hall: We can laugh at Trump now, no need to wait a few years to confirm we should be laughing at him.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-25/hydroxychloroquine-no-better-than-regular-covid-19-care-in-study?srnd=premium
@ Menzie
Menzie, I wanna make it clear, I’m leaning very strongly towards your side on this issue (that phase 3 and safety precautions should be taken before introducing drugs ( especially combinations ) to large numbers of COVID-19 patients). However, you know some are going to give you flack over the N=30 deal. Bro, just saying…..
I still think Vitamin D might play a bigger role than people are perceiving—as a “defense” , not for immunity from the virus. I am sure some people are getting hearty laughs out of that one, but I just feel there’s something there—similar to my “recession before end of July” thing. You know, you just get that feeling in your gut about some things. Surely even highly educated people of an ethnicity that exhibits a love of gambling, would identify to a degree with trusting your gut sometimes?? Even if their career path and level of professionalism demands focusing on empirical data.
Bruce Hall Swept under the rug??? The study was published by the US government and is publicly available. Even you were able to find it. In what sense is that sweeping something under the rug? But note that the study was based on SARS-CoV and not SARS-CoV-2 (a.k.a. COVID-19). Tests were on animals, not humans. That 2005 study simply showed that Chloroquine was a promising treatment for SARS viruses. That has never been in dispute. But promising is a lot different than promised. The evidence so far is very mixed. The French results were ambiguous at best. Expanding trials to NYC is fine, but you shouldn’t delude yourself into thinking that Chloroquine will make the problem go away. People in general and older people in particular have a tendency to look for and believe in miracle cures. But that’s not how medicine works. One treatment makes a marginal improvement here and another treatment makes a marginal improvement there. You should not expect big leaps in survival rates from any treatment. That’s why you need rigorous clinical trials. You have to be able tease out the difference between random improvements that would have happened without any treatment and improvements that were truly attributable to the treatment. I’m afraid that your gullibility and willingness to buy into any and every claim to make the COVID-19 pandemic go away is just symptomatic of someone your age. Young people tend to believe they are immortal. Older folks tend to fall victim to false hope. It’s always been so. I suggest you turn off Fox Noise.
If Trump and Musk say it works, well golly there, you just know it works great right away without testing! I am so please to be informed ot this that I will run 20 red lights in their honor.
I may have to revise my opinion that this will not be as bad as 2008-2010. I sure hope it is not as bad as it could be.
I spent 90% of my work career in the biopharma industry and retired almost 10 years ago. I have been tracking drug/vaccine/diagnostic trials and development. There are a very large number of pre-prints coming out on COVID-19 these days. About half of what I am reading are from various groups in Hubei province where this all started. I am not sanguine (and hope to be proven wrong) about a small molecule treatment for this virus. One main trial in China on an HIV anti-viral failed and those data have already been published. I would add that I am not putting any faith at all in small trials that get reported in newspapers. the real problem is the lack of proven therapies for the critically ill. One antiviral studied in China appears to be 70% effective in treating mild cases of infection. Favipiravir is approved in Japan for seasonal influenza and might be useful as a first line treatment when symptoms first appear. However, we don’t have any definitive clinical trials demonstrating this. The largest trials right now for critically ill are cytokine inhibitors with the Roche drug, tocilizumab, showing some preliminary evidence in Chinese trials. there is now a 24 site Phase II trial starting in Italy where they really need something to work. Researchers are publishing data as quickly as they are able to.
Remdesivir is in trials all over the world and data should be coming in. This Gilead drug is has some difficult synthetic chemistry and how fast it could be produced at scale is uncertain (assuming it works). IMO, the best approach for the critically ill is an antibody treatment against the virus. Ideally, monoclonal antibody therapy is best as it can be scaled up. However, purification of antibodies from recovered patients is an option BUT only small amounts of antibody can be produced in this way.
there are only two vaccines in trials, both of which are gene based and have never been tried in humans to this point. There was a failure in imagination following the Zika virus outbreak of a couple of years ago where a number of vaccine platforms were developed. Some were tested in humans and other were not. The vaccine industry is stepping up to the plate right now but it’s going to take time to assess potency and more important safety. I don’t think we want to see a safety problem such as the one that occurred during the Swine Flu vaccine use in the late 1970s.
I’ll try to post findings here as they come in. Anything that is not part of a well designed trial can probably be disregarded unless you still think that Laetrile is a useful cancer drug.
A very thoughtful and informative review of the evidence so far. I would suggest people read your reviews and just ignore the misleading cheerleading from people like Trump and his Minnie Me Bruce Hall.
Thanks. For those of you mathematically inclined and into modeling here is an interesting paper from a Greek/Italian group that models the Lombardy infection by predicting day Zero and they extrapolating to when they expect it to fade out: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.17.20037689v1.full.pdf The math is a little to dense for me but their conclusion is that new cases should fade away by the end of May as of the “lock down” date of March 8.
@ Mr. Goldhammer
I wish to second pgl’s sentiments.
Both of your comments are the true gems that 98% of newspapers can only opine to. When David Brooks gets condescending about blogs and the people it attracts, I wish to have a large arrow pointing to exemplary comments such as your two comments above. Blogs often outrank newspapers as far as true substance and content—your contributions in this thread are an example of that. You are part of the “mostly quiet” majority of readers that Menzie’s and Jim’s writings attract. I hope you will not be shy in sharing thoughts with Menzie and Professor Hamilton’s readers as the COVID-19 saga continues.
Interesting breakdown on COVID-19
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWzbArPgo-o
I’m gonna be honest and say I haven’t watched this to the end, but the beginning seemed to be so well done, it’s hard for me to imagine the rest of it to the end is not quite good.
A continuation of the previous video in my comment above. Menzie, I’m pretty damned sure there’s no vulgarity in the video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdoN_XsHWBI
This model assumed a 90% reduction in the transmission rate due to the lockdown, with no real data to support that. Also, their transmission rate estimate was on the order of 4, very roughly twice what I’ve seen from other researchers. I wouldn’t put much faith in that…
Beijing says it’s all gone, except for those dirty Laowai that keep “reintroducing” it. So I have all the evidence I need on the success of Lockdowns. You know, because they’re so “offended” by how they get treated by western countries, we know they’re very sensitive and self-conscious to this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebanS7YL6V4
“Does anyone know what happened to Grandma Zhang???” “Hmmm, well, she hasn’t been back to the apartment since she got Meiguo Sex Lung Disease that started in Wuhan.” [Awkward silence as they try figure out which family relative might turn them in to authorities if they provide further explanation] “Speaking of which, when are you returning my illegal copy of Windows 10??”
For those who may not have gotten the line about laetrile:
https://www.theindependent.com/news/laetrile-a-cancer-cure-or-a-hoax/article_1417804f-383b-5a14-acb3-6b6f224ed71e.html
Laetrile: A cancer cure or a hoax?
Tell the truth pgl, you’ve been dying to know for quite awhile now what sites Bruce Hall bookmarks on his computer. I found the list:
https://www.wired.com/story/opinion-how-one-particular-coronavirus-myth-went-viral/
thanks for the update alan. i am not optimistic of any therapeutic to help in the near term. if this lingers into the fall, hopefully we get some support from these therapies. i have had hopes for remdesivir, as well as favipiravir. however, your comments seem to suggest the japanese drug is more effective at healing the less severe more quickly, than assisting with those in a very dangerous condition. i was hoping for a more promising outcome for the very ill. got giving up hope yet, just not as promising as i had hoped.
“IMO, the best approach for the critically ill is an antibody treatment against the virus. Ideally, monoclonal antibody therapy is best as it can be scaled up. However, purification of antibodies from recovered patients is an option BUT only small amounts of antibody can be produced in this way.”
That is the opinion of Drosten too.
Thank you. This is enlightening, if a little disconcerting.
Thank you for the very thoughtful post. I suspect Trump is being updated on the 250 patients getting compassionate use treatment of remdesivir, and the clinical trials using the drug that began in Feb in China. I know we are not privy to that data, but he surely is. And yes, it may not be a complete picture, but it surely would be valuable to understand.
That’s not a defense of his politics, handling of the epidemic, boisterous nature, science, or hairstyle. It is simply an acknowledgment that he has a view of critical information that we do not.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/03/21/819099156/might-the-experimental-drug-remdesivir-work-against-covid-19
Mass General treatment guidelines recommend “considering” Chloroquine for treatment of hospitalized cases. My doctor friends opine that Fauci is downplaying it to prevent uninfected and the infected but minimally symptomatic from demanding it, reserving it for the cases that truly need it. Menzie, love your posts, please keep it up
Bayer is producing a lot of this alleged miracle cure for COVID-19 so if the market thought it was about to be that “game changer” Trump claimed, Bayer’s stock should be soaring. Let’s take a look:
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/BAYRY
Stock price has declined from $21 in early February to only $13 now.
Of course Bruce Hall is more worried about making his killing in the stock market than how many people have been killed by COVID-19 so he brags about investing in this stuff. I can only imagine how much Brucie Boy has lost on his own stupidity!
bruce claims to have cash on hand to make his killing. but if he has significant cash on hand, that means he missed out on the past 10 years of a major bull market. not exactly credible for a guy giving investment advice. and if he says he market timed and pulled out? apparently his actions were not inline with his advice that this was just the flu, and will also pass. overall i would not take much investing advice from bruce. even if he has cash, i doubt he puts it to action at the appropriate time.
Rather than just predict the obvious recession due to the consequences of the pandemic, perhaps it would be more educational to predict the outcome of government action, federal and state, as to stopping, retarding or exasperation the recession. The details are scant, but will it work?
Ed
Below is a link to an LA Times article summarizing where we are related to drugs that may be useful to abate Coronavirus, Covid-19
https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2020-03-21/coronavirus-treatments-where-we-are-and-what-we-know
Question for the experts: Will quantum computers increase the speed of finding useful drugs to impede or cure virus infections. Given the impact on the world economy from Coronavirus , if quantum computers would significantly increase the speed of drug development, maybe development of quantum computers should be a modern, “Manhattan Project”.
AS, for this to happen, you need more people knowledgable about writing quantum code. this may be a greater barrier than the development of a physical system. and it will probably occur through a machine learning approach using quantum. this will still require a large database of the chemical and biological experiments. i agree this is a promising path, but even with a modern manhattan project in quantum, your end goal is still quite some time away.
Thanks for the input.
How long do you think is “some time away”?
“Wired” magazine is a pretty good source for Quantum stuff, at least beginners. I’m sure there’s better ones to get deeper into it,
currently we have systems capable of running around 50 qbits. to solve simple real world problems, i would guess we need somewhere in the area of 1000 qbits. this will take years to develop. and full service quantum computers probably need hundreds of thousands or millions of qbits to be effective. my gut feeling is when the technology can get us over 1000, it probably scales to those larger numbers. optimistically this gets done in the next decade, maybe five years. but coding and taking advantage of these quantum systems is where we will have a problem-it requires much more skill than typical coding. it requires a completely different way of thining about the problems. there are very few people, today, who are capable of doing this. i am not optimistic we will have many in the next 10 years either. unless your “manhattan project” idea includes both the hardware and the software. the software will basically come down to throwing a bunch of junk on the wall and see what sticks. if what sticks has great value, this pays off. if it does not have great value…
There is no need for quantum computing as lots of work has been done over the past decade to refine search algorithms for promising drugs. There was an article in last week’s New York times on a CA group that was doing just this based on some of the predicted protein interactions of COVID-19. the forwarded their information to a group at Mount Sinai in NYC who have the capability of doing in vitro viral inhibition studies. The pre-print of this came on line today and they identified 69 compounds that are either approved drugs or have been in clinical studies for some other condition. this is perhaps the most comprehensive paper to appear but I’ve seen maybe 6-8 other papers that had lower numbers of potential drugs. I remember taking medicinal chemistry back in 1969 and would have never predicted that we would be able to do stuff this fast!
The big question right now is getting things into clinical trials ASAP so that data can be acquired quickly. We also need to show that chloroquine or hydroxychloroquin with and without azithromycin (a common antibiotic that may play a role here) work in clinical settings and for which patients. It may be these are only useful in non-critical care patients; we really do not know right now.
Thanks for the update.
What I was also wondering is if quantum computers could model clinical trials without the need for human subjects, perhaps by modeling the drug, human DNA and the virus DNA reactions.
I saw a news program in which a company president mentioned that the company had modeled a drug for Coronavirus from the DNA of the virus posted by Chinese scientists shortly after the outbreak. This may be the same CA company you mention. I can’t remember the name of the company.
“What I was also wondering is if quantum computers could model clinical trials without the need for human subjects, perhaps by modeling the drug, human DNA and the virus DNA reactions.”
no. not in the near future, will this be possible. requires too many qbits.
Mnuchin calls upcoming recession “not terribly relevant”:
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/mnuchin-recession-not-terribly-relevant-coronavirus
When Fox News’ John Roberts asked Mnuchin whether we’re in a recession amid the coronavirus outbreak, Mnuchin responded that’s “a technical question” and is “not terribly relevant” in this situation. “Are we going to have reduced economic activity this quarter? Absolutely,” Mnuchin said. “I think, next quarter, a lot depends on how quickly the curve of the medical situation works. When people focus on recessions, it’s normally because of prolonged economic environment.”
I can only imagine what this overpaid clown meant by prolonged economic environment bu!t to him the suffering the average person is about to endure is not relevant to him as well as he and his corrupt buddies in the White House can keep ripping the rest of us off for another 4 plus years. Now that would be a prolonged economic environment.
Looking forward to Dr. Trump next recommending bleeding and leeches.
He is a really smart guy – so yea!
The orange creature’s favorite word in the Sunday, March 22 press conference is “pent up demand”. I’m trying to imagine the look on Menzie’s, Prof Hamilton’s, and every other PhD economist’s face every time he says “pent up demand”. Aside from all the great polaroid moments that would make, it would also make a nice drinking game.
Folks, as a personal aside. I spilled half a cup of “Venom” Cherry Lime energy drink on my keyboard. It still works, and the only thing I notice is my space key doesn’t have the “free give” to it as it did before (Gee, I wonder why??). I keep thinking there must be an electric short in it I haven’t noticed yet, but not yet. Cross your fingers for me.
What matters, of course, is effective demand.
Any policy aimed at maintaining income aims to maintain effective demand, but some such policies will work better than others. Slush funds aimed at preserving corporate income might do some good, but if the aim is to preserve effective demand, then the ideal recipient is someone who will spend all of the money offered by the government. Households which have lost income are unlikely to save much of a benefit check. Firms which face reduced demand will save until demand is restored. The choice seems pretty obvious.
Trump reverting to the mean. Initially Trump was in denial and didn’t want to hear anything that wasn’t a good news story. Trump told us that this was all just a Democratic hoax. We also heard how it would “miraculously” wash away. We saw the Trump that we all knew…well, all of us except the usual MAGA cheerleaders. He was an incompetent bungler who got by with happy talk and adjectives in the superlative. A con man. A used car dealer. Precious time was lost because Trump couldn’t get past his ego. On a scale of 1 to 10, he earned something like a 1 or a 2 (at best). Then last Monday he seemed to get his act together. Another good effort on Tuesday. And another good effort on Wednesday. I was surprised and started to feel a little reassured. He earned a 7 or 8. And then with Thursday’s briefing he reverted to form. It was one of the most irresponsible press conferences I’ve ever heard. Friday was another disaster. It was another Trump Show where experts had to genuflect before the Great Leader. Each speaker had to flatter Trump, but only after Trump droned on endlessly flattering himself. And his press conferences over the weekend set new lows in competence and transparency. A lot of people are going to die because gullible people like Bruce and CoRev and Peak Trader and sammy voted for this clown show.
And there was no Dr. Fauci there today. So he started out not too badly as long as he just read announcements of stuff shipped and National Guard getting called up, but then when answering questions he was back to berating reporters for supposedly “nasty questions,” with him sneering at word Romney is self-quaranting, and then this astounding performance where he complained repeatedly about having spent or lst “billions of dollars” because he ran for president. Sheesh. No wonder the markets were reportedly dropping like flies during this performance: the president who opens his mouth and the markets drop.
I kept wondering how long Fauci would last going to those pressers, and was only half watching today’s (Sunday’s). Towards the very end of the presser I wondered to myself (“Was Fauci there and I missed it??”). I see it as a HUGE red flag for how things are going on behind the scenes with how the administration is handling things. Fauci is very self-aware of his public image and what he views as his “legacy”. One missed presser by Fauci is not a big deal. Let’s say Fauci misses 7/10 of these pressers in the next 10 days—that’s a telegraph message to everyone that there’s near screaming sessions going on behind closed doors between Fauci and say—-Pence and Navarro. In my opinion that’s a good way to read the tea leaves on how bad the clusterF*ck is behind the scenes.
I think you ( and my country) is looking at a depression in other words a drop in output of over 10%.
This happens when you close most businesses down.
Steven Kopits: “researchers in France treated a small number of patients with both hydroxychloroquine and a Z-Pak (azithromycin)”
Hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin are a dangerous combination of drugs that can cause ventricular fibrillation and cardiac arrest.
But hey, the Medical Genius in Chief has a good feeling about it so it’s probably okay.
We are being led by morons.
Source?
@”Princeton”Kopits
A query made by a man who only ever sources his midnight fantasies of being on the FOX 4am newscast. The adverse drug interactions are listed alphabetically towards the end of the link.
https://www.pdr.net/drug-summary/Plaquenil-hydroxychloroquine-sulfate-1911
Anything which causes heart arrhythmia and/or rapid heartbeat is also apt to drastically increase the chances of cardiac arrest. “Princeton”Steve, have you acquired an inability to google topics which make you look like an A$$ ?? Otherwise known as “Barkley’s Syndrome”??
just as a followup, data just out of china suggests a fifth of the folks who died there had heart damage. the thinking is that the virus is causing damage to the heart, or may actually cause a heart attack itself. they are seeing myocardial injury in the folks who died, i have not heard about any results related to survivors. so steven, there is definitely risk in providing a drug that could actually enhance this factor, especially in the elderly. this could be why it works better on the young and/or healthy.
@baffling
I have very minimal medical knowledge, pretty much the same as any random guy you would grab off the street. But after delving semi-deep into the limited knowledge of the COVID-19, my semi-educated guess is, the heart damage occurs in the very very late stages of the effects of the virus. So, as far as the virus, I don’t think the virus itself is causing the damage to the heart—but rather the latter stage symptoms giving cause to other latter stage symptoms—the heart, which will cause death. The main thing it is hitting is your lungs. Then when your lungs start having a harder time transporting oxygen from the alveoli into your blood system (because the alveoli get damaged and/or (mostly AND) the gas composition in your lungs becomes more and more “jumbled”, then your respiration increases, and your heart has go into “double-time” (heh, definitely a non-technical term there) to make up for the low oxygen levels in your blood—-and then you’re more apt to have heart failure due to the over-working of the heart.
There’s a decent chance I got some of that wrong, so if any medical professional wants to correct me, I’d be more than happy to be corrected. this is obviously a simplified and abbreviated version of what can/does happen
I want to add as an addendum for some of you who want to get tests but don’t deserve the tests. If your temp is not above 100.4 (and even then maybe) please don’t waste medical professionals’ time and PPEs on a negative test. And how much do you want to bet hundreds of people with a temp below 100.4 have wasted tests and medical professionals’ time now?? I sure as hell would be willing to bet on it.
” the heart damage occurs in the very very late stages of the effects of the virus. So, as far as the virus, I don’t think the virus itself is causing the damage to the heart”
this is probably true, although we do not have any data to clarify the issue (at least not available to me). the important issue is that it is dangerous to promote remedies that could really be ineffectual, or dangerous, without proper knowledge. a drug that causes heart arrhythmia in a patient with myocardial injury is dangerous to promote to people who may have that exact problem! and it is quite possible the drug is perfectly safe for others without that problem, but who would otherwise recover from the virus without the new miracle drug. this is why the medical community is so upset with dr trump promoting these drugs like a snake oil salesman. only large clinical trials will give us the answer. trump is simply promoting confusion here.
“I want to add as an addendum for some of you who want to get tests but don’t deserve the tests.”
if we ever get to the point where we can actually conduct large number of tests, this will change. because we will need to know who has/not been exposed if we want to recover quickly. this needs to occur in a nearer time frame than our administration has currently charted. if trump wants to open up by easter, he needs to get off his ass and get this stuff done, pronto.
as a side note, i am tired of trump blaming bush and obama for an “obsolete” response system. what has trump been doing for the past 3 years? maybe spending less time on the golf course and more time planning for emergency contingencies would be a start.
Interesting job posting from Gilead Sciences:
Medical Information Manager (Remdesivir/Covid-19)
posted by ISR RECRUITMENT LIMITED
Full Time Uxbridge, Greater London £300,000 – £400,000 / year
Job Description
Medical Information Manager (Remdesivir/Covid-19)
* Stockley Park, Uxbridge
* 12 month contract
* £300 to £400 per day
The Opportunity:
We are currently looking for an experienced Medical Information Manager to help our client (a global Pharmaceutical company) to support activities against the spread of Remdesivir/Covid-19 across the ACE (Australia, Canada, and Europe) region.
You will work to provide Medical Information Vendors with the tools they need to deliver accurate advice and information to the public during this pandemic.
Skills and Experience:
* 3 years’ plus working in Medical Information in the Pharmaceutical Industry
* Experience working with Medical Information Vendors (e.g. physicians, pharmacists, nurses and NHS managers)
* Abe to deliver multiple projects in a fast-paced, cross-functional environment
* Education: Degree qualified in Pharmacy or relevant Life Sciences
Role and Responsibilities:
* Ensure that medical information vendors have access to the appropriate information to give accurate advice to patients
* Provide resources to enable training of vendor staff to ensure that the vendor service meets expected standards
* Deal with new information from finding on Remdesivir/Covid-19 and implement process improvements
* Work closely with both affiliates and vendors to improve base standards and ensure inspection readiness
Applications:
To learn and understand more about this role working as a Medical Information Manager based in West London; please contact James Sample here at ISR Recruitment or please share a copy of your CV or online business profile for a call back in the strictest confidence
Reference Number
211911423
I thought this was a nice story, so I wanted to share it. Oklahoma is a low income per capita state, that has gotten no federal matching funds for the Affordable Care Act, so I wanna say $17,000 is no small thing in the state of Oklahoma. They said they will continue on working to get MORE supplies for local hospitals, in continuum, for as long as local hospitals were requesting it.:
https://www.koco.com/article/chinese-community-raises-dollar17000-to-buy-masks-supplies-for-metro-hospitals/31920142#
With the possible exception of the local Jewish community, I am unaware of any other ethnic group offering this kind of support for the complications related to COVID-19 in the state of Oklahoma.