"Watts Up With That" now posts this daily worldwide virus summary. Two things to note: the scales are logarithmic, so a hopeful sign is a curve under 45%, but of course any convex curve beats a concave one. Also, this is deaths per million of population, not the case fatality rate. I prefer the former, because we still have no real grasp of the total number of cases, but we can get a pretty good handle (except in countries we suspect of straight-up lying to us) about both the total deaths and the total population. That rate will of course confound two variables: the cases per population (spread), and the death rate for cases (severity/efficacy of medical system/health of population), but that's the breaks.
From the same source, here is a far more informative than usual recap of the prospects for treatment with chloroquine and remdesivir. I believe there are interesting things happening with convalescent serum, too, though those are hard to scale. Most of these treatments have problems with either evolved resistance, cost, or scalability that mean they will be most helpful in buying time while we work on an effective vaccine. Still, my biggest concern at the moment is finding an approach that relieves our fear of crashing the medical system enough to let most of us go back to work supporting the prosperity that enables us to have a first-class medical system in the first place. If we have to give up on the medical system, we might as well let the virus rip, accept the losses, and remember what it was like to live a century ago, because you can't stop producing essential goods for fear of every contagion out there.
Good article. thanks
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