Coronavirus
Posted: Tue Aug 25, 2020 12:42 pm
When I said things like that I got jumped on with both feet. Enjoy your free pass apparently.
If the US had 1,600 deaths from the virus, I bet people would be much less concerned.
Responding to an outcry from medical experts, Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Stephen Hahn on Tuesday apologized for overstating the life-saving benefits of treating COVID-19 patients with convalescent plasma.
Scientists and medical experts have been pushing back against the claims about the treatment since President Donald Trump’s announcement on Sunday that the FDA had decided to issue emergency authorization for convalescent plasma, taken from patients who have recovered from the coronavirus and rich in antibodies.
Trump hailed the decision as a historic breakthrough even though the treatment’s value has not been established. The announcement on the eve of Trump’s Republican National Convention raised suspicions that it was politically motivated to offset critics of the president's handling of the pandemic.
Hahn had echoed Trump in saying that 35 more people out of 100 would survive the coronavirus if they were treated with the plasma. That claim vastly overstated preliminary findings of Mayo Clinic observations.
A sudden change in federal guidelines on coronavirus testing came this week as a result of pressure from the upper ranks of the Trump administration, a federal health official close to the process tells CNN, and a key White House coronavirus task force member was not part of the meeting when the new guidelines were discussed.
"It's coming from the top down," the official said of the new directive from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
White House coronavirus task force member Dr. Anthony Fauci said he was in surgery and not part of the discussion during the August 20 task force meeting when updated guidelines were discussed.
"I was under general anesthesia in the operating room and was not part of any discussion or deliberation regarding the new testing recommendations," Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta.
"I am concerned about the interpretation of these recommendations and worried it will give people the incorrect assumption that asymptomatic spread is not of great concern. In fact it is," he said.
The new guidelines raise the bar on who should get tested, advising that some people without symptoms probably don't need it -- even if they've been in close contact with an infected person.
Finally!
So a 2.9% false negative; and 1.5% false positive. So not exactly tests you'd want every single person to take, but very reasonable for normal usage.The FDA is authorizing emergency use of a $5 rapid test that could help ease the nation’s coronavirus testing bottleneck, POLITICO’s David Lim reports.
The test’s manufacturer, Abbott, plans to ramp up production to 50 million of the antigen tests per month, allowing patients to get their results in 15 minutes without the use of any lab equipment.
— The authorization could help expand testing in key areas. The test must still be administered by a health provider, but can be done in point-of-care settings like doctor's offices. That could help boost testing access in underserved areas and in schools and workplaces.
— Results appear highly accurate. Abbott-submitted data show the test accurately detects 97.1 percent of positive samples and 98.5 percent of negative samples.
I was told we needed less testing, tho?President Trump is set to announce a $750 million deal to buy 150 million rapid Covid-19 tests from Abbott Laboratories, a White House official said. The tests return results in about 15 minutes.
100% agree.
Yeah. It's nice to get out of the house for real. One of the last pre-lockdown meals we had was our favorite sushi place cuz we didn't know when we'd be able to go back. Well, 5 months later we've gotten take out twice from there, but haven't eaten in . :\
As the White House coronavirus task force privately warned state officials that they faced dire outbreaks over the summer, top Trump administration officials publicly downplayed the threat of Covid-19, documents released Monday by the House Select Subcommittee on Coronavirus show.
The subcommittee published eight weeks of internal White House coronavirus reports, which are prepared by the task force and sent privately to governors. The newly published reports begin on June 23 and the most recent report that’s published is from Aug. 9. The White House has declined to make all the reports public.
Good news: Virus isn't mutating quickly so vaccines may be very effective.We’ve also known for a while that some COVID-19 patients’ hearts are taking a beating, too—but over the past few weeks, the evidence has strengthened that cardiac damage can happen even among people who have never displayed symptoms of coronavirus infection. And these frightening findings help explain why college and professional sports leagues are proceeding with special caution as they make decisions about whether or not to play.