Re: Corona Virus Outlook Question
Posted by:
Keep the faith man
()
Date: March 29, 2020 01:11PM
Thanks for the well wishes, Steve.
There's a ton of research collaboration going on right now between researchers all over the world, and university labs in several cities in the U.S. are working on vaccines, as are other countries'. I don't know that I'd expect anything "soon" by most interpretations of that word, but I have seen a couple of things that are cause for hope:
- Abbott just got an emergency approval from the FDA for their test and the device to process it. It can deliver a positive result in 5 minutes and a negative in 13. (I know that sounds weird, but false positive and false negative are different error modes, so I think I can see why there might be two different times mentioned.)
- The FDA, for perhaps the first time in memory (except maybe once or twice in the 1980s or 1990s) seems to have a fire lit under it by the administration. I suspect that's how Abbott got their approval through so quickly.
The bad news:
- China delivered $500,000 worth of test kits to Serbia, presented it to the media as if it was foreign aid, charged the Serbians for it, and now the Serbian medical leadership has tossed them due to an 80% inaccuracy rate.
- Some evidence is emerging that people who have had this illness and recovered may be either reinfected or relapsing. From the standpoint of human immunity, that's not good news on the vaccine front.
- The more disturbing aspect of it is that there is at least one large Asian government that seems to have made the call not to track those relapsed/reinfected people as active/new cases. In general, there are some very good reasons to be circumspect about the data that you see from any country that doesn't fall under the general category of "Western democracy."
It is possible that the Western democratic governments are going to have to face some of these choices soon too. It is clear that most administrations are weighing economic recovery or even the mere appearance of economic recovery against the impact of countermeasures to attempt to diminish the disease.
- China has reopened Hubei for people from Hubei to travel. There are mobs from other towns flipping police cars because they don't want to let the Hubei people in due to distrust of the Chinese government's tracking of the actual virus situation and whether people are actually without the virus. Interestingly, Beijing kept its prohibitions on admitting people from Hubei in place, so these other cities do have a logical argument.
- China is mounting a massive information operation primarily against the U.S. right now, and a lot of well-meaning people are repeating what are essentially PRC influence campaign talking points without knowing what they're doing. Normal people shouldn't have to worry about this stuff, but that's the world in which we live. If a lot of the news seems contradictory right now, that's because it is.