Lol what? It is snowing over here right now but NY hasnt seen snow all year? Mother nature has lost it
Some good news. At least for Minnesota https://www.twincities.com/2020/04/...deliver-testing-needed-to-reopen-the-economy/ Mayo says it has capacity to deliver testing needed to reopen Minnesota’s economy By PAUL JOHN SCOTT | Forum News Service PUBLISHED: April 15, 2020 at 8:54 a.m. | UPDATED: April 15, 2020 at 1:48 p.m. ROCHESTER, Minn. — A day after Gov. Tim Walz set 5,000 COVID-19 daily diagnostic tests with ample antibody testing capacity as the benchmark required to reopen the state for business, Mayo Clinic says it is confident it will be able to help fulfill that volume of testing. “As we open up the testing outside of Mayo Clinic we are prioritizing our colleagues here in the state to have access to that testing,” said Dr. William Morice, chair of the Department of the Department of Laboratory Medicine at Mayo Clinic, in an interview on Tuesday. “We are currently in active discussions with the state government to try to understand how our capacity can help provide the testing needed, as other hospitals are as well.” Specifically, Morice said, the clinic had the ability to produce 8,000 molecular or diagnostic tests daily, and 10,000 serological tests. “Basically,” he said, “we will be able to provide much of that to the state here going forward.” During a call with reporters on Tuesday, Walz said he had spoken with Mayo Clinic CEO Gianrico Faruggia on Monday evening about Mayo’s testing capacity, adding however that “we’re not overly optimistic we can overcome all of the reagents now experiencing shortages.” Soon thereafter in the same press call, state Health Commissioner Jan Malcolm asserted that news would soon be forthcoming about an expanded Mayo role in meeting the state’s new high-volume testing expectations required to lift the closure and return Minnesotans to work. It’s a striking departure from the status quo thus far, a coronavirus scarcity economy that has had the state focusing its limited supplies on patients and workers in congregate living centers while “private labs,” a category likely dominated by Mayo Clinic, have turned in three to five times as many tests each day, limiting this resource to Mayo high-risk patients, hospitalized persons and staff with symptoms of COVID-19. The Clinic has likely conducted just over 20,000 such tests in state. As a federal reference laboratory in receipt of government-provided kits from drug maker Roche, Mayo has tested over 60,000 patients from elsewhere in the country during this same time. With Walz’s recent assertion that the state will build its own materials needed to control the pandemic, the heat has suddenly turned up for state organizations to focus their work locally however, if they hope to reenter the economy. “Reopening society here in Minnesota is of great interest to us,” Morice, explained, “both as a member of the community, major employer and to allow patients to regain access to Mayo Clinic. Anything we can do to support that, we will certainly put our full weight behind.” Walz framed the need to ramp up to 5,000 tests daily not only to help the state return to work in June, but as an off-the-shelf, rapid-response surveillance capacity going forward that will be needed to control outbreaks expected later this year with the second and third waves of the illness. “It’s not just tests,” Malcolm said. “It’s swabs, there’s PPE required, there’s all kinds of reasons why providers have said, well, we’d love to test more people, but we really want to test some people first.” Malcolm said the state is in the process of developing a larger base of public health officers needed to deliver tests and conduct contact tracing, an arduous process of interviewing persons newly diagnosed and then identifying and advising them on quarantine. And then there is this: Could the federal government order Mayo and others to offer their testing capacity to patients elsewhere across the country? “I certainly hope not,” Walz said. “If we do this and build resiliency we’ll get through this … when it comes back again, if we have this regimen in place, and that depth to do it ourselves, it will not be nearly as disruptive next time.” Also on Tuesday, nine more Minnesotans died of COVID-19, bringing the total deaths in the state to 79. The deaths occurred in residents of Ramsey, Dakota and Wilkin counties, with one resident in their 60s, two in their 70s, while six deaths occurred in Hennepin County, five of whom were in their 80s and one in their 90s. Cases were reported for the first time in three congregate care centers: Bywood East and Meridian Manor in Hennepin County, and Lakewood Manor in Todd County. The confirmed case rate jumped by 45 to 1,695 on Tuesday. However, state health officials believe the confirmed case rate is 1% of the state total, meaning the true case count in the state now likely approaches 170,000. State health officials outlined a number of barriers still remaining to link lab capacity to the governor’s strategy as defined by “test, trace and isolate.” “It becomes tricky to ask these providers to do a coordinated, state-aligned testing regime,” Walz said of the disparate community of private health care organizations to be enlisted in a mass-testing protocol, some of whom have already deviated from the state prioritization guidance.
There are something that really do not need to be fully re-open. If folks can work from home, even at a loss of some productivity, do so. This lessen the traffic for those that do need to be at the workplace. My bet is many IT, lawfirm, professional services will have a signf workforce at home for the duration of this crisis.
The drug is already used widely. It needs to be used at proper doses and under the supervision of a doctor.
It's being used with no benefits, according to studies. I realize that a lot of hospitals are using it, but there's no science to actually back its use, as far as I know.
It isn’t that complicated. We can open up the economy more when we have sufficient testing. We don’t have sufficient testing because of the President. We need to side with caution. Having another major outbreak would be completely devastating.
Hydroxychloroquine is being used not chloroquine like in that Brazilian study. It is important not to mix these up. Also I was meaning that hydroxychloroquine is widely used already for other ailments. It is regarded as safe although arrhythmia is possible with it. As far as I know the large New York study of HCQ and Zithromax is still ongoing. Additionally hospitals are using various drugs with no actual testing to back their use against covid 19. There usually is a scientific basis for using whichever drug they are using in an off label/compassionate care fashion to fight against covid19 and the ARDS produced by it.
I certainly agree and I’ve been saying that too. I don’t think testing has been limited because of the president though. We are currently at around 150k-160k tests per day and we have been there for a bit now. We likely need to be 10x that number at minimum. The last major development was those Abbott labs rapid tests machines that was pushed by the President. Is that what you are referring to? I honestly haven’t kept up with why those are supposedly widely distributed but not being used. Is there some issue with their reliability or materials needed for them?
My system I work for says the rapid tests do not meet their accuracy standards. I haven't seen the science or numbers behind it, though.
A certain person would say thats fake news. "Look, Im not a doctor, but I know a lot of things, and maybe itll work, maybe it wont. Lets find out."
The idea is very simple and we have models we can emulate. But the execution of it and getting the US up and running the system is a big big challenge. With 20%+ unemployment, 2.2T spent already.... you think we would spent a few quick B and make it a top priority to get the system in place, to ramp up our covid19 infrastructure to enable us to open up fast and safe. It's just crazy to me that we don't have a coordinated effort along that line.... Jan and Feb were critical lost months to prep the US for initial containment. We were forced into mitigation and doing so blindly with our lack of prep. It looks like March and April may very well be critical lost months to prep the US for going back to containment. We may very well need to bounce back and forth between containment and mitigation if we open up without the right system in place to sustain containment. Everyone should at least agree on one thing - open back up as fast as possible safely. Yet we seem to not being doing all we can to get there. A gold standard to learn from (and a warning that even that standard have set-back as Singapore went to full lockdown last week) I Was Exposed To Coronavirus In Singapore. Here’s What Their Rapid Response Looks Like.
Hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine are essentially the same. Hydroxychloroquine is considered less toxic while chloroquine is considered more effective treating malaria. Hydroxychloroquine does have a risk of cardiac toxicity.
I was listening to a webinar put on by a division of Mayo Clinic on the Construction industry and COVID 19. It was very informative and had some good information in general besides construction. Here are some key takeaways: 1. We shouldn't expect this situation to end soon. While warm weather might be helpful that isn't very certain. A vaccine is still a long ways off and treatments like antibody serum treatment is still uncertain how effective they are. This is important as Mayo is doing research into antibody testing and treatment. 2. While Mayo has developed new tests there still are chances of false positives especially for the antibody testing. 3. The construction industry is better prepared to deal with the disease because people in construction already use a lot of PPE and will pay heed to use of other PPE like masks. This means that for states that are not considering construction essential might be able to allow for construction. 4. The virus can survive for quite awhile on common construction materials. It can survive for 24 hours on copper and up to 3 days on steel. On porous materials it can survive for a few hours. 5. To limit exposure of work crews scheduling will need to change as it will be difficult to have multiple trades on site. This means the costs and time for construction will increase.
So the Health Commission of Guangdong Province in China had initially recommended those sick with the virus be treated with 500 milligrams of chloroquine twice daily for 10 days but the Brazilian study instead decided to bump up the dosage to 600 milligrams, which resulted in heart complications and death? That doesn't sound like the Brazillian study followed the dosage recommendation from the China to me.
