So what am I missing with these early results from the Remisdivir trial that came out today? Here are the relevant results that having people talking about how this is a game changer:
“Gilead Sciences said Wednesday preliminary results of a coronavirus drug trial showed at least 50% of patients treated with a 5-day dosage of antiviral drug remdesivir improved and more than half were discharged from the hospital within two weeks.”
The study has no control group and those don’t seem any different, maybe actually worse, than what the average hospital results with no Remisdivir. So what am I missing? Story below:
hard to say without reading it. Googling around it looks like 8% of the five day group died and 11% of the ten day group died. Which could be good if 40% of people who are hospitalized die and everyone in the trial is hospitalized. And they might have even given it to the sickest hospitalized patients, in which case an 8% fatality rate might be great.
The comparison to Ebola seems stupid. What percentage of patients that get infected with Ebola wind up in the hospital versus the percentage with COVID that do? I imagine with Ebola it’s near 100% and with COVID it’s around 20% (iirc?). So when COVID is severe enough where someone needs to be hospitalized, it’s really dangerous. Thanks, guy, that’s real helpful information.
Hospital and nursing home stats are useless apart from spotting trends.The best indicator of the net fatality effect of covid (this will include people who died of other illnesses because of a lack of of available facilities thanks to covid) is year-on-year death tallies for the same period, which last time I looked showed (surprise, surprise) a larger number of deaths than the government are admitting.
Does that mean that 8% and 11% of patients died within those 5 or 10 day windows? Because their actual press release has wildly different numbers from that so I am trying to make sense of it. Even from that article it includes this:
“Gilead released its own study results this morning suggesting that severely ill patients receiving five days of remdesivir fared just as well as patients receiving a 10-day dosing regimen. More than half of both dosing groups were discharged from the hospital within two weeks of beginning their medication.”
Which does not imply that only 8-11% of patients died. If they mean 8-11% of patients died during the 5-10 day dosing window them I believe that as it often takes much longer than 5-10 days in the hospital to die.
Seen the graph yesterday and its bad… Looks like we’re over 40,000 by a wide margin, its absolutely unforgivable what’s happened in our carehomes & hospitals.
Hey he is only off by somewhere around 25,000 to 30,000 per day. Even a conservative CFR of 3% is looking in the range of 30,000 dead in the next month, probably more.
I’d be surprised if it meant 8% died during the five day window and 11% in the ten day window. Seems more likely it is over the same amount of time and longer than five or ten days. But who knows without reading what they did, and it doesn’t seem like anything is published.
I mean it’s really useless to try to parse this stuff. It’s trying to closely examine what our scientifically-illiterate media paraphrase from what Gilead PR people put out. It’s corporate science filtered through two layers of dumb.
