Does anyone know what the deal is with the AZ approval? When I went looking this morning, I found this horrifying article from a few weeks ago that says that AZ won’t be ready to go to the FDA until April. But then here Fauci says (two weeks ago) that he expects FDA approval to be “weeks away.” Given that everyone has known that it’s safe and effective for months, it’s frustrating to have it sitting on the sidelines.
Thanks again to mr Millman, though Inhave the Simpson’s mole man in my minds eye.
Grounds keepers seems odd.
I would assume they’re going increasingly into debt.
WFH Captain’s Log, Stardate 01/02/2021, Entry 1:
Daytime television remains terrible
3 Likes
omg it’s snowing in New York have you heard let’s spend all day on it
I have not been following it.
WH task force says there will be an over-the-counter rapid COVID test that you can take at home. supposed to be 95% accurate within 15 minutes
3 Likes
Wonder how long it will take to scale up. Sounds like this partnership is for 8.5 million tests, which is helpful but nowhere near the scale we need for rapid testing to be very useful. Did they mention cost to the consumer?
testing seems kind of pointless now. We’ve shown that we won’t change what we do once cases are up.
1 Like
I think as the vaccines are rolled out rapid tests can still help open faster and safer.
Say the vulnerable are vaccinated, general public getting vaccinated but in process, community cases reasonably low but not zero, healthcare system not in crisis, data on how well vaccines protect against variants and reduce transmission still being fleshed out. Rapid tests that are cost effective and plentiful could open up a lot of normality if that’s where we are come summer/fall.
1 Like
Oh I’m sorry, I don’t mean to come off as disagreeing with you that more testing is good. Just frustrated that the results don’t seem to matter to the public at large.
2 Likes
Testing at this stage is more for people to collect data to study how the disease is progressing.
My brother got a test a few months back as a non-essential and it took 2 weeks for them to tell him that he was negative. If you have to get tested everytime you get a cold and it takes ~3 weeks of a 4.5 weeks illness to find out whether or not you had it, what is the point? Not trying to say that people shouldn’t change their behaviors but I’m not sure what you are expecting people who have to pay their rent and shit to do.
testing doesn’t take weeks anywhere that I’ve heard of. The lowest priority test I send takes 1-3 days.
Alternative explanation is that fitness trainers and marathon runners are more likely to detect drops in their performance/stamina. Like, if I feel x% worse in my daily life, it’s so subjective that I’m unlikely to say “Oh, I’m suffering adverse effects from COVID.” But if I’m a regular runner and run based on a constant heart rate, I might notice a relatively small decrease in pace/stamina. Going from an 8:00/mile to an 8:15/mile pace might not seem like a big deal, but if you track your pace and heart rate religiously, you’ll see it objectively in the data.
Also, I’m back teaching in person and will be posting about it here, since it’s not really COVID related:
1 Like
This is a good theory. I had a similar experience when I had myocarditis when I was younger.
It’s also very different from what long haulers complain about, at least the ones I see. They complain of continued pain, shortness of breath, abdominal pain, fatigue, etc. They don’t have decreased athletic performance, they experience active symptoms and near disability.
I’ve worked a bunch of these people up in the ER with vague complaints of SOB and CP. I have a pretty low threshold to work these people up for myocarditis and pulmonary embolism. Most of them don’t have changes on their chest x-ray. The ones that end up getting a CTA to rule out a pulmonary embolism almost all don’t have changes on their CTA, which a lot of asymptomatic people will still have.
It’s going to be tough to unwrap it all and there will be people who have consequences down the road. The issue is that there are various internet fads that come and go with vague chronic illnesses. Some of these don’t exist at all (chronic lyme), some are more dubious (chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, and more)… but all become a ‘thing’ that people start claiming they have when they don’t really fit diagnostic criteria. It’s hard to see covid long hauling falling into that pattern.
That’s definitely one of the problems. Clinics can’t schedule far out so people are getting the call to show up at the clinic within a couple of hours and for the elderly there’s a lot of planning that’s involved in going places. We were having 40 - 50 % no shows on appointments. The variation in no shows/shows then ripples through the process and we’d have to have people waiting because they didn’t thaw out enough vaccine because not enough people initially showed up even though we were running at like 50% capacity.
Was gonna take a minimum of 3 days in NYC. Given the spike around New Year’s, probably more like the 5 days of the 3-5 day window they gave me.
1 Like
I’m not up on the NYC game like I used to be.