The Fake News Cycle

Back in April. Found myself longing for some DD News in the midst of all this COVID coverage overload....and it was exactly like it used to be..20 minutes of what happened on the day, and you are done...well, maybe a little government propaganda mixed in...but you do know it when that happens :)

That kinda got me thinking....We used to read newspapers, which was maybe 8 pages of what happened the previous day and one or two pages of opinion columns. There was enough time to get to know what happened before consciously going to the middle page and reading someone else's opinion, and you knew their background and where they were coming from before you took in that opinion.

Somewhere along the way we went into a 24 hour news and breaking news cycle. And then it became opinion pieces of the person on TV, while the real news slowly disappeared to the scroll at the very bottom. We are told what to believe, and we may or may not happen to read the 'real' news events scrolling below.

And then we went to social media. Now we read our friends and families opinions first, maybe see some opinion pieces on the news, and we never really hear the actual events that happened or take a break to think for ourselves..no touch with reality!!

Wonder what will come next?!

Talking Sense....

What these doctors say are based on their individual experience and probably 100% true. We (both federal and many states) have huge stockpiles of HCQ created at the beginning of the pandemic and there is no restriction on any doctor who believes in it to prescribe it. Things have moved on from initial HCQ days and they have much better outcomes observed with other drugs like Remdesivir and simpler treatment protocols like oxygen for lung issues which have already shown improved survivability in current hospitalized patients. While officially there are no treatment protocols yet (none scientifically proven), CDC points to most current research on this for interim management and it is always updated with new findings. You can go see the actual results from early HCQ trials in NYC and every drug they tried there on the NIH page.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/therapeutic-options.html
https://www.covid19treatmentguidelines.nih.gov/whats-new/

If we step back and look at it there are two very different issues here that I feel we should not mix. The vaccine and The Cure.

1. the vaccine - lots of folk are working on it, it will come some time in the future, hopefully this year, maybe next, worst case 2 years down. I find it best not to worry about it for now. It is a preventative measure. Daily news on vaccine trials and hope do not really help. This will be a big money maker for whoever wins that race.

2. The cure - this has two parts to it. Am summarizing as a very simple average math here - not exact percentages.
part a - about 90/100 folks get better with no intervention.
part b - about 10/100 get hospitalized. Out of the 10, about 9 survive and 1 dies.

For the 10 people hospitalized, we are seeing much better outcomes with current treatment protocols as opposed to initial days (March) where at one point almost every single patient hooked up to a ventilator in both UK and NYC were dying. These protocols will get revised whenever someone tries something new, and enough numbers are behind it to support a recommendation.

Given that 99 out of 100 make a recovery, this is where I believe claims come in. For a doctor seeing patients at clinic, they could be prescribing anything they believe in, and they saw 100 or 500 and there is a good chance all of them recovered. This does not become sceintific basis that the treatment was the cause of the cure. But overall, NIH and others around the world are monitoring the numbers and if there is a statistical significance in a treatment, it will get updated.