Two Total Must Reads On COVID19
It's been a long day of blogging, reading, blogging, reading. Here are two articles that I highly recommend. Both of them are rather scary, although the second one is hopeful in that it shows that medical professionals are slowly coming to a better understanding of this virus and how it acts. That means that they can tailor their treatment, even short of HCQ+ therapy.
The first article is from Hotair, taking off from an article that first appeared at Gothamist: Staggering Surge Of NYers Dying In Their Homes Suggests City Is Undercounting Coronavirus Fatalities . What the articles show is the NYC healthcare system under real stress. Allahpundit goes beyond the Gothamist by drawing parallels between the situation in NYC and that in Italy. Read it all, but I'll give you a flavor for what Allapundit is talking about :
There were reports last week that the official COVID-19 death toll in Italy and Spain didn’t fully account for the spike in deaths regionally in those countries between March 2019 and March 2020. There were “excess” deaths that were officially unexplained. The problem, it seemed, was that health authorities were too overwhelmed with caring for the living to take time to test all of the dead. If you came down with a fatal case of coronavirus and died at home, chances are your death wouldn’t count towards the disease’s death toll even though you’d be counted in the regional numbers for deaths by all causes during March.
It’s happening in New York too, says Gothamist in a new story this morning. If EMTs show up to an apartment where someone has passed away, the deceased will be classified as a “probable” case of COVID-19 if there’s evidence of a flu-like illness present — but probable cases don’t count towards the official coronavirus death toll. Unless the deceased was tested for the disease before expiring or is tested postmortem by the medical examiner, they’re left out. How many cases like that might there be in New York? A lot: ...
Allahpundit ends by quoting a tweet:
Andy Biotech
@AndyBiotech
#COVID19 New York state now has more confirmed cases than Italy
Even worse, NY has much higher #coronavirus testing positivity rate suggesting more severe under-testing than Italy:
NY: 138,836 positive out of 320,811 tested = 43%
Italy: 132,547 positive out 721,732 tested = 18%
The second article is from WebMD: Doctors Puzzle Over COVID-19 Lung Problems . It's somewhat technical. On the one hand it confirms in its own way that this virus is NOT the flu. On the other hand it shows that medical people are, well, learning from their mistakes--mistakes made because this virus really is a new thing. There's a lot of talk about the proper use of ventilators. IMO, the future of treatment probably lies with medication, but this type of treatment will still have a place for critical cases.