Day 55. Thursday. Lies, damned lies.
In case you missed it, the four of us still seem to be quite healthy.
The political balance is clearly tilting in favour of giving people some hope, though the (detected) infection rates in both US and UK are roughly flat and the death rate, while declining quite convincingly in the UK, is going down slowly and somewhat ambiguously over here.
About those death tolls, there is reason for doubt. Comparing mortality figures in March and April against previous years, the NYT finds that New York (the state) has some 23k deaths unaccounted for, versus an official body count of 26k due to CoViD-19, and California slightly more than 1k. China has also revised its numbers upward. The silver lining of this analysis, if one dare call it that, is that the real death rate probably peaked sooner than we realised. The lead lining is that the infection spread further, faster, and probably started even earlier than any of us knew.
I'm now re-reading The Mercy Men, a childhood favourite of mine, whose plot revolves around a medical centre that pays subjects vast sums (OK, at the time when this book was written, USD150k was a vast sum) to participate in experiments from which they are unlikely to recover or even survive. BTW, "mercy" is med-speak for "mercenary". A proposal is floating around to recruit (without payment) volunteers to try a vaccine against CoViD-19 by the most direct means imaginable: administer the vaccine, then "challenge" (that's med-speak for infect) them with the real thing. It is, by today's standards, apparently as unethical as the Mercy Men scenario always was. This puzzles the intermediary through whom I heard it, and puzzles me too. People attempt (for example) Mount Everest with far greater risk of death or permanent injury than a 20-29 year old human would have with SARS-CoV-2 at a moderate dose. Time is still precious, since it remains politically unavoidable to relax restrictions on movement and contact.
P.S. On Saturday (?), I heard that the WHO was no longer discouraging such "human challenge trials", but issuing guidelines for how to conduct them.
The political balance is clearly tilting in favour of giving people some hope, though the (detected) infection rates in both US and UK are roughly flat and the death rate, while declining quite convincingly in the UK, is going down slowly and somewhat ambiguously over here.
About those death tolls, there is reason for doubt. Comparing mortality figures in March and April against previous years, the NYT finds that New York (the state) has some 23k deaths unaccounted for, versus an official body count of 26k due to CoViD-19, and California slightly more than 1k. China has also revised its numbers upward. The silver lining of this analysis, if one dare call it that, is that the real death rate probably peaked sooner than we realised. The lead lining is that the infection spread further, faster, and probably started even earlier than any of us knew.
I'm now re-reading The Mercy Men, a childhood favourite of mine, whose plot revolves around a medical centre that pays subjects vast sums (OK, at the time when this book was written, USD150k was a vast sum) to participate in experiments from which they are unlikely to recover or even survive. BTW, "mercy" is med-speak for "mercenary". A proposal is floating around to recruit (without payment) volunteers to try a vaccine against CoViD-19 by the most direct means imaginable: administer the vaccine, then "challenge" (that's med-speak for infect) them with the real thing. It is, by today's standards, apparently as unethical as the Mercy Men scenario always was. This puzzles the intermediary through whom I heard it, and puzzles me too. People attempt (for example) Mount Everest with far greater risk of death or permanent injury than a 20-29 year old human would have with SARS-CoV-2 at a moderate dose. Time is still precious, since it remains politically unavoidable to relax restrictions on movement and contact.
P.S. On Saturday (?), I heard that the WHO was no longer discouraging such "human challenge trials", but issuing guidelines for how to conduct them.
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