Two every hour
Los Angeles is being hammered the way New York was last spring.
LA county has faced an onslaught of terrifying Covid developments in recent days, including a surge in deaths, dire shortages of hospital resources, and fears that doctors will have to make agonizing choices to ration care.
…
Heading into the darkest holiday season some have ever endured, there were grim reminders across the LA region that the virus is spreading uncontrolled. The city’s mayor briefed the public while in quarantine after his daughter became infected. Hospitals were setting up triage tents. Residents waited in line for hours for Covid tests at Dodger stadium. The region recently ordered more body bags.
Outbreaks were afflicting grocery stores, restaurants, stores, shopping malls, Amazon warehouses, manufacturing plants, government buildings, police and fire departments, jails and prisons and film sets.
Officials in LA county estimated that one in 95 residents were currently infectious, and that two residents were dying of Covid every hour. More than 6,000 Covid patients are in the hospital, and intensive care units (ICU) are filled to capacity.
And it’s getting worse, not better.
LA is now reporting an average of more than 14,700 cases each day, a 78% increase from two weeks ago, according to LA Times data. Seven hundred people are hospitalized daily; in October there were fewer than 150 daily hospitalizations. By January, officials say it could be 1,400 admissions each day. More than 9,000 people have died.
…
With shortages of beds and staff growing, hospitals are starting to have previously unthinkable discussions about how they may ration care if there are too many patients. It could mean a decline in the quality of care for all people facing emergencies, and an increase in deaths.
…
LA’s affordable housing crisis, which forces many to live in crowded conditions, also makes the region vulnerable to spread, said Bibbins-Domingo. Her research found that early lockdowns did not protect Latinos or people without high school degrees, probably because they were forced to work.
Who could ever have guessed that severe wealth inequality could create conditions that would spread a deadly new virus? Who could possibly have imagined that crowded expensive housing and low wages and minimal or no healthcare would be fertile ground for a pandemic?
I was on a Zoom social event last night, and some guy started monologuing about how nobody should take the COVID vaccine, COVID’s death rate isn’t that high, and he has a scientific background so he knows this stuff, and “I’m-not-anti-vaccine-I-just-think-there-are-too-many-too-soon,” and he read a paper that Dr. Fauci wrote ten years ago that he thinks supports his position never mind what Fauci actually says….
I may have lost my temper a bit. I’m sure some of the other participants thought I was the jerk for confronting him in a not particularly nice way, even though he’s the one spreading dangerous false information.
I regret nothing.
(His “scientific background” was not in any relevant field. I know, you’re shocked.)
@Screechy Monkey #1
This is my shocked font.
Screechy @#1:
I would hazard a guess that there is a chance of a possibility that the Zoom guru was from the political Right. As in https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2020/12/a-strategic-plan-for-the-current-australian-crisis/
Omar — possible but I tend to doubt it based on some other statements. He struck me as more of the type who thinks very highly of himself as an apolitical “independent thinker,” and thus engages in a lot of knee-jerk contrarianism.
Oof. I encounter those sorts all the time. Lots of them are quite smug and pompous.
My wife and I have our own doubts about getting vaccinated against Covid-19. All of the usual testing needed before a new medical treatment is approved, typically taking five to ten years, is done for a reason. They claim that no corners have been cut in approving the new vaccines, but that is impossible.
Athel @#6:
Developments are coming thick and fast:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/dec/27/the-breakthough-medicines-that-could-change-the-course-of-covid
If a drug does not work, then it does not work; but presumably no other harm is done. But Covid-19, even if you are not one of that ~3% that succumbs to it, can leave your internal organs very damaged. It is not a disease to be dismissed the way Trump was doing before he caught it himself.
Omar @ #7
I agree up to a point, but it’s not as simple as that: if a drug doesn’t work it may have harmful effects like anaphylactic shock due to an allergic response, and you can die from that. Nonetheless, you are right up to a point.
However, I’d have been a lot happier if the authorities had been more honest about it. Instead of saying now we have a vaccine (or several) everything is wonderful, they could have said, this is a major emergency, and in order to produce a treatment before millions more people die we’re starting a treatment that we think is OK, but there hasn’t been time to do all the usual tests of safety and effectiveness.
As I said, the normal testing is done for a reason.
A C-B,
My understanding is that the “normal testing” was all done here. The process was just much faster, because:
(1) new mRNA technique sped up the development phase;
(2) pharmaceutical companies made it a top priority — normally vaccine development is a small aspect of operations that only gets a modest amount of resources, but this year it was high profile and got whatever resources they needed;
(3) similar phenomenon in terms of government review and approval — stuff that normally would have sat on an official’s desk for months along with all the latest erection pills and “restless leg syndrome” treatments was looked at immediately;
(4) lots of volunteers to do large-scale clinical trials; and
(5) a virus that is widespread enough that the clinical trials were able to accumulate enough evidence of statistically significant effectiveness quickly.
None of which involves corner-cutting.
One more item to add to point #2 on Screechy’s excellent list: Normally, the pharmaceutical companies would wait to ramp up large-scale production until after testing was fully complete and approvals were finalized. In this case, they took the risk to have stock in place ready for release and distribution as soon as they got the go-ahead. So if there were serious side effects or the manufactured batch had to be scrapped for some other reason, the pharma company would take a financial hit. But of course the potential payback is huge, so even without any altruistic considerations (which I would not generally attribute to pharma companies), there are justifiable business reasons for their actions. Again, no corner-cutting required.
Theo,
Actually, I believe that the government programs (including, yes, Operation Warp Speed in the U.S.) protected companies from the financial risk by guaranteeing payment even if a vaccine failed to win approval. But your underlying point, that normally companies go slow so they don’t lose money manufacturing a product that they won’t be able to sell, is a good addition.
Here is a good summary by the University of Michigan’s medicine department. along with further links.
Screechy,
Perhaps this varies among the pharma companies – at least one article I read about the Pfizer vaccine says that they were taking the financial risk themselves( https://news.yahoo.com/pfizer-ceo-refused-taxpayer-money-175100171.html).
Interesting. Thanks.
I’ve had some experience working with the pharma industry on drug discovery and production and agree with Theo and Screechy. The vast majority of time spent developing drugs – the “usual development time” often cited of 5-10 years – is not taken up with tests. It’s mostly about putting the finances in place.
In fact, if testing does take that long, people in the industry tend to suspect it’s because the first few trials didn’t get the results the company wanted so were quietly buried, requiring more cycles of testing until the ‘right’ answers turn up.
I think pharma companies have a lot to answer for, but I don’t think that rushing these vaccines to market needed any skimping on tests or strongarming of approval bodies. I’m happy to trust the vaccine, even though I don’t trust pharma business practices.
One other point. A patent agent I know tells me that the reason drugs are so expensive to buy over the counter in pharmacies is that they have to be patented or have patent applications in process, and in every country in the world at time of sale. Otherwise, they will get pirate-manufactured in some obscure country somewhere and sold on major metropolitan markets.
An added dimension of this is that many such countries have outright gangster governments, who can charge what they like for the patents.