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https://www.statnews.com/2020/04/16/early-peek-at-data-on-gilead-coronavirus-dru

A Chicago hospital treating severe Covid-19 patients with Gilead Sciences’ antiviral medicine remdesivir in a closely watched clinical trial is seeing rapid recoveries in fever and respiratory symptoms, with nearly all patients discharged in less than a week, STAT has learned.

Remdesivir was one of the first medicines identified as having the potential to impact SARS-CoV-2, the novel coronavirus that causes Covid-19, in lab tests. The entire world has been waiting for results from Gilead’s clinical trials, and positive results would likely lead to fast approvals by the Food and Drug Administration and other regulatory agencies. If safe and effective, it could become the first approved treatment against the disease.

The University of Chicago Medicine recruited 125 people with Covid-19 into Gilead’s two Phase 3 clinical trials. Of those people, 113 had severe disease. All the patients have been treated with daily infusions of remdesivir. 

“The best news is that most of our patients have already been discharged, which is great. We’ve only had two patients perish,” said Kathleen Mullane, the University of Chicago infectious disease specialist overseeing the remdesivir studies for the hospital.

Her comments were made this week during a video discussion about the trial results with other University of Chicago faculty members. The discussion was recorded and STAT obtained a copy of the video.

The outcomes offer only a snapshot of remdesivir’s effectiveness. The same trials are being run concurrently at other institutions, and it’s impossible to determine the full study results with any certainty. Still, no other clinical data from the Gilead studies have been released to date, and excitement is high. Last month, President Trump touted the potential for remdesivir — as he has for many still-unproven treatments — and said it “seems to have a very good result.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/coronavirus-latest-news-04-18-2020-11587197819?mod=hp_lead_pos3

The coronavirus pandemic in America’s hardest-hit state is starting to wane, its governor said, as more U.S. protesters rallied to lift social-distancing restrictions.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said at news conference on Saturday that the number of people currently hospitalized in the state for Covid-19, is under 17,000 compared with about 18,000 at its peak

With more than 235,000 reported coronavirus cases, New York accounts for about one-third of all cases in the U.S., according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. It has nearly three times as many as the No. 2 state, New Jersey, despite a population just over twice as large.

But the average person infected with Covid-19 in New York now infects 0.9 other people, compared with 1.4 at the height of the outbreak, according to Mr. Cuomo, indicating that the virus’s spread is now slowing.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8232131/Adherence-social-distancing-spurs-dip-projected-U-S-coronavirus-deaths.html?ito=push-notification&ci=13334&si=5694542

Coronavirus death toll estimate DROPS again: Top COVID-19 model shows predicted US fatalities have fallen by 12% from 68,841 to 60,308 – just a month after it projected that 84,000 would die

The University of Washington’s model projected on Friday that the US death toll will reach 60,308 by August 4
This marks a 12 percent decline from 68,841 deaths forecast earlier in the week
Better-than-expected social distancing practices and strict state shutdowns have helped slow the outbreak and improve the outlook for Americans
States with low death rates could relax some restrictions on May 4, experts said.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/trump-to-give-commencement-to-west-point-pence-delivering-speech-at-air-force-academy_3317096.html

President Donald Trump said he will give a commencement speech at West Point, a U.S. military academy in New York.

Trump told reporters in Washington Friday that cadets will be spread out to comply with social distancing guidelines amid the COVID-19 pandemic. COVID-19 is caused by the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, a novel coronavirus that emerged from mainland China last year.

“I understand they’ll have distancing, they’ll have some big distance, so it will be very different than it ever looked. Do I like the look? No, I don’t,” he said.

Eventually, graduations will return to normal, with people “nice and tight,” he added.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/04/18/its_time_for_the_white_house_to_focus_on_drug_approvals_142941.html

In this COVID-19 era, it’s the scientists who will ultimately get us back to work. It is time for the Trump administration to acknowledge this and adjust its public communication strategy accordingly. It is hard to envision a scenario looking like the “normal” we all crave until we have therapeutics to protect us from the coronavirus’s effects as we await a vaccine to prevent us from catching it. Once we all know we can take a drug that will minimize symptoms and possibly prevent infection in the first place, we can interact safely in ways that even a ramped-up testing regime will not allow.

Daily White House briefings, and as a result the media and the American public, have been fixated up to now on the response to the pandemic from the administration and Congress. These updates primarily focus on three of the four main categories of activity: federal aid to businesses and displaced workers, needed supplies and equipment for our health care system, and the social distancing regimen complete with handwashing and homemade masks. The two medical faces of this crisis, Drs. Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx, have concentrated on the last two and keep faithfully explaining what the administration is doing, or should be doing, to increase testing, equip frontline workers, and ultimately flatten the curve. 

We hear much less about the fourth category of activity, that is, the race to find a therapeutic solution to combat the virus while we await a vaccine. Therapeutics include anti-viral drugs that inhibit the coronavirus and antibody therapies that boost immunity to the virus, and possibly off-label use of existing drugs. 

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/coronavirus-model-estimates-us-deaths-down

A key coronavirus model has lowered its estimate of total U.S. deaths in its latest projection of how many will die due to the contagious virus.

The revision will likely fuel criticism from skeptics that initial projections were overblown, and one that government leaders may use to say that efforts to combat the spread are working.

The University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) lowered its projection of total deaths from 68,841 (with an estimate range of 30,188 to 175,965) to just over 60,308 (with an estimate range of 34,063 to 140,381) in an update published Friday.

The institute said that change was partially driven by both higher estimates in states like New York and New Jersey, and lower projections in states like Massachusetts, Connecticut, Georgia and Florida.

“By incorporating the trend in cases alongside COVID-19 deaths in our model, many locations are now predicted to have longer peaks and are taking longer to move down the epidemic curve to zero deaths,” a statement from the institute said. “Subsequently, these places now have higher projections for cumulative COVID-19 deaths through the first wave.”

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/493195-its-our-right-and-duty-to-question-those-deciding-americas-fate

When in the United States of America did it become objectionable, or considered outright wrong, to question the wisdom and policies of our politicians, bureaucrats and “experts”?  If “we are all in this together,” as people have been declaring about the fight against COVID-19, then shouldn’t we all have a say in our collective fate? That should be the right of every American citizen, even those who disagree with states’ shelter-at-home and business closure orders.

When did it become wrong, or a crime punishable by arrest, for Americans to peacefully protest a governor’s stay-at-home order, as happened recently in Raleigh, N.C.? Evidently our right to peacefully protest has become a “non-essential activity” to be broken up by the police. In Lansing, Mich., protesters against Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s stay-at-home order used vehicles for their “Operation Gridlock.”

To curb the spread of COVID-19 in America, we have temporarily surrendered our lifestyles, livelihoods, life savings, mental health and even our very freedoms to the dictates of politicians, bureaucrats and public health experts. “For our own good,” they have put in place orders to control the movement and actions of most of the nation’s 330 million people.  

No one can deny that COVID-19 is a dangerous, highly-infectious virus. That said, the solutions to curb the contagion seem to be holding Americans hostage. Are we still allowed to contrast what’s happening with this pandemic to those of the past and ask logical questions?

https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/493370-keeping-the-coronavirus-death-toll-in-perspective

As governors and mayors debate when to lift their coronavirus stay-at-home orders, public health experts predict a flood of deaths should businesses be allowed to reopen before universal testing or a vaccine for the disease is available. These are the same experts whose previous apocalyptic models of coronavirus fatalities and shortages of hospital beds and ventilators have proved wildly inaccurate. It may be useful to look at some numbers for perspective. 

As of 3 p.m. Eastern on April 16, there were 30,920 coronavirus deaths in the U.S. New York state accounted for 14,198 — or 46 percent — of those deaths. New York City accounted for 11,477 of New York state’s deaths and 37 percent of national deaths. This week, New York City started counting deaths as coronavirus fatalities if the patient had not been tested for the disease but was suspected postmortem of having it. This relaxed standard increased the U.S. death count by 17 percent. Other jurisdictions will inevitably follow suit. 

The national coronavirus deaths represent a death rate of 9.4 per 100,000 of the U.S. population. Take out the New York fatalities and the New York share of the national population, and the coronavirus death rate for the rest of the country is 5.4 per 100,000 of the U.S. population.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/coronavirus-crisis-ventilator-shortages-have-not-come-to-pass/

The ventilator shortages of which we were all gravely warned have not yet come to pass.

In March, one of the most feared aspects of the pandemic was the widely reported coming shortage of ventilators. One well-publicized estimate, repeated by the New York Times, the New Yorker and CNN, was that the U.S. would need roughly one million ventilators, or more than five times as many as we had. Gulp. Ventilators are expensive, they’re complex machines, and they can’t be churned out in the thousands overnight.

In the state that (as of today) has one-third of the country’s confirmed COVID-19 cases, New York governor Andrew Cuomo sounded the alarm for ventilators repeatedly. On March 27, he acknowledged “I don’t have a crystal ball” but said his state desperately needed 30,000 ventilators, maybe 40,000, but had only 12,000. When President Trump noted that Cuomo’s state had thousands of unused ventilators it hadn’t even placed yet, Cuomo admitted this was true but said he still needed more: “Yes, they’re in a stockpile because that’s where they’re supposed to be because we don’t need them yet. We need them for the apex,” Cuomo said at the time. On April 2, Cuomo predicted the state would run out of ventilators in six days “at the current burn rate.” But on April 6, Cuomo noted, “We’re ok, and we have some in reserve.”

Now New York appears to have passed the apex. Deaths, a lagging indicator, crested at 799 on April 9 and hit 606 on April 16, the lowest figure since April 6. Hospitalizations are also declining, and on April 16 also hit their lowest level since April 6. Cuomo today has so many ventilators he is giving them away:

https://spectator.us/stanford-study-suggests-coronavirus-more-widespread-realized/

Another day, and yet more evidence has appeared that could indicate the number of people who have been infected with SARS-CoV-2, the virus which causes COVID-19, might be vastly higher than official figures suggest. This time a Californian study suggests the figure in one county could be more than 50 times the number who knew they had had the virus.

A team from Stanford University and other colleges recruited volunteers in Santa Clara County via Facebook adverts and produced a sample of 3,000 representatives of the county as a whole. They were then invited for blood tests to detect the presence of antibodies to the virus. The result was positive in 1.5 percent of cases. Adjusting for age, gender and ethnicity the results suggest that 2.8 percent of people in the county had already had the virus. That might not seem many, but at the time of the study — on April 4 and 5 — only 1,094 people in the county were recorded as having the virus. The study suggests the real figure is between 48,000 and 81,000.

Like many studies which have been pre-published in order to aid understanding of the COVID-19 pandemic, the paper produced by the Stanford-led team has not yet been peer-reviewed. Moreover, it took place in a part of the United States where very few people have so far tested positive with the virus. It would be interesting to see the experiment repeated in New York City, where recorded infections are far higher.