welcome to another MedCram COVID-19 update quarter of a million people
confirmed infected worldwide were over ten thousand deaths and eighty six
thousand total recovered if we look on the world ometer chart of individual
countries Italy has by far the most active cases here at 33,000 and has the
most number of total cases per million population United States has jumped up
to about 14,000 total cases in terms of total cases per million were at 43 that
may be because of low testing although that seems to be getting better here
slowly I wanted to show you something that I received it's called the handbook
of kovat 19 prevention and treatment and this is actually published by Professor
ting Bo Liang and he goes through various things he has a foreword at the
beginning and the contents anything from staff management to imaging findings on
kovat 19 patients all the way to ECMO support for kovat 19 patients and what's
going on with this I think is very important is just the experience and the
information for us because they've gone through this already so I will leave a
link in the description below and other big news hydroxychloroquine was fast
tracked by the fda yesterday a march 19th
the data for this medication is not the rigorous data that the FDA would usually
want to have which is a pretty extensive randomized control trial with placebo
etc and that still has not been done but because of the situation and because
there was some early data out of France that seemed to show that it was positive
and of course we here at Meg Graham have been looking at this drug for some time
saying that it was a promising medication at least on the in-vitro side
of things we can see why that happened this hydroxychloroquine is also known as
Plaquenil it's a medication that's used in patients with lupus for instance I
called around specifically today to different pharmacies and there was none
available where there was last week there was absolutely none available
today and so of course this brings up issues about drug availability and the
ability for any of our resources that we have whether it's personnel whether it's
physicians healthcare providers in general beds ventilators medications do
we have enough to meet the surge with this many people getting sick all at the
same time there's a news article in the Duluth News Tribune that was published a
couple of days ago and it's looking at the fact that there are a lot of health
care professionals that are contracting Kovan 19 and was there a way that we can
test to see whether hydroxychloroquine might prevent that and so we see here
that David Boulware is actually starting a study to see whether or not we can
reduce the number who get sick by 50% of these healthcare providers and in this
study the volunteers are going to get either the medication or lesea bo also
news last night governor Newsom of California locked down the entire state
of course that's relevant to where we are here as
I live in Southern California with his prediction being that 56% of the state
residents will be infected with corona virus in the next eight weeks of course
the big news a couple of days ago was this new medication called the vit para
ver which may be effective in corona virus let's go over the results of that
so the trial looked at the intervention group Philippa Revere and lepen aver and
ritonavir and there were 35 people in the treatment group and 45 people in the
control group interestingly the New England Journal of Medicine article that
we talked about yesterday showed that this was basically no different than
placebo number one they looked at the clearance of the virus in terms of days
then how long it took for the fever to go down for how many was the fever gone
within two days they want to know whether or not the chest x-ray improved
and they wanted to know if there was any adverse reactions and these were
statistically significant so in terms of viral clearance and days took four days
in the treatment group and 11 days in the control group so statistically
significant that was p-value of less than point zero zero one in terms of
fever gone at two days that was seen in 72 percent of the treatment group but
only 26 percent of the control group in terms of chest x-ray improvement that
was seen in ninety one percent of the treatment group and only 62 percent of
the control group and interestingly in terms of adverse reactions that was only
seen in 11.4% but in the control group adverse reactions were seen in about 56
percent
okay well we'll be back soon for our next update please come and see us at
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