Time for an update.
Europe is now in the grip of a vicious second wave of the pandemic. Most countries in Europe have locked down. Travel, especially by air has now virtually stopped.
England will go under lockdown Thursday, Wales has been under lockdown for over a week, and NI under lockdown for some time. Scotland is saying with a complex 5 tier system for the time being.
Hospitals in Liverpool are becoming overrun and cancelling urgent cancer surgery even.
In the US we have total chaos, and a quite appalling situation in most states. One decent study showed that between March and June Covid-19 deaths had been under reported by almost 90,000 as judged by excess deaths. So I suspect true deaths are now around 400,000 and it is possible could e approaching half a million.
In the rural areas of the Midwest things are getting desperate, especially in North and South Dakota. Idiot Trump continues to hold super spreader events. His rally in Bemidji sent 24 to the hospital within the week, two of whom went to the ICU. The serious situation in Beltrami and Hubbard Counties seem attributable directly to the super spreader event the clown held there.
Bemidji hospital is now in a difficult situation. They are allied with Fargo and part of Sandford Health out of Sioux Falls just recently bought by Intermountain Health out of Utah. Fargo hospitals are full, so a macabre game of musical chairs has started. If Bemidji needs to send a critical Covid-19 case to Fargo, they have to take a less serious case from Fargo in return. So the Life Flight Helicopter takes and case to Bemidji and takes the serious case to Fargo.
I am told that the certified nursing assistants are scared and leaving their posts, and agency CNAs are having to be flown in at great expense.
Things seem to be going worse than even the worse predictions currently and I think will get worse. Figures in the UK showed that the hospital, ICU and death trends were exceeding the worst case models. Hence the lockdown.
In the US I think we are in a very bad place and feel things will be horrific round the country this winter due the acts of a truly evil and vile president. His claims about doctors inflating the figures are totally beyond the pale. A recent study in Medscape showed that one in six hospital cases are now either hospital workers or members of their families.
Dr Fauci gave a half hour interview with the editor of JAMA this past week which I post here.
Here is an update from the FDA with Dr Marks, who will make the call on EUA for vaccines.
On the therapeutics front, the biggest advance has been the success of cheap Dexamethasone in serious cases along with better Oxygen administration.
Remdesivir seems to shorten time to recovery but does not reduce mortality. Monoclonal antibodies given early reduces hospitalization 70%, in early studies. However it does not seem to help cases who are bad enough to be admitted to hospital. So E.I. Lily stopped their in hospital study. The US government have spent over a billion dollars on E.I. Lily's monoclonal antibody at $1,500 per dose.
On the vaccine front a Bristol university study showed the Oxford vaccine cause the body to make a perfectly exact copy of the S-spike antigen and produced an extremely robust antibody response and T-cell response in all recipients, including elderly subjects.
There are a number of vaccine candidates of which the Oxford vaccine is the most promising on a number of counts.
The UK is embarking on very controversial challenge studies. They will give unprotected volunteers the virus to determine the reliable infectious dose. This is the most dangerous and controversial part of the study. This is to avoid the need for a blinded study and will greatly reduced the number of unprotected volunteers that need to be exposed to the virus. Volunteers will be injected with the various contenders, and once they show a good immune response will be exposed to a reliable infectious dose on Covid-19 virus.
Boris Johnson is hoping to have enough people in the UK vaccinated against Covid-19 to ease restrictions by March 2021.
We certainly have to wish these volunteers well and hope they all survive.
The best hope to turn things around in the US, is for President Trump to get his head handed to him on a plate tomorrow or the subsequent few days. As you know he lost this Republican vote some time ago.
