Welcome to week four of Washington DC's
official lockdown.
Though for many of us residents of the city
it's been a lot longer that we've
been confined to our homes for.
For me and my family, we've now been here for about six weeks.
For the next few weeks and months
I will be bringing you a weekly blog trying
to answer some of the policy questions
that we're all asking right now related
to the coronavirus crisis.
How deadly is this disease?
When will the lockdowns end?
What will life look like afterwards?
Right now, I'm thinking a lot about disinfectant.
I'm speaking just hours after several major household goods
companies were forced to issue warnings to their customers
telling them not to drink or inject disinfectant.
And that's because US President Donald Trump wondered aloud
from his press conference podium last night whether doing so
might actually constitute an effective treatment
for coronavirus.
By now, many of us will have seen
the video doing the rounds of his medical adviser Dr Deborah
Birx, apparently trying to hide her reaction to the president
as he was speaking.
But actually, there's a more serious underlying issue here.
I suspect that one of the reasons that the president was
talking in this way was that it reflects a growing
pessimism among many people about the potential treatments
for coronavirus.
Earlier this week the FT revealed
that rendesivir, the drug being developed by the company
Gilead, has not proven effective in its first round
of clinical trials, and in fact caused
serious side effects for some of the patients being treated.
Then this morning the US Food and Drugs Administration
has warned doctors about prescribing hydroxychloroquine.
That's the drug that the president has also
talked glowingly about, particularly in conjunction
with azithromycin, an antibiotic.
The FDA said this morning that those drugs,
when taken together, or in fact, just
hydroxychloroquine on its own, could cause heart problems
for some patients.
All this tells us that we're still
very much at the early stages of dealing
with this new coronavirus.
We remain, I suspect, many months away from a treatment,
and certainly more than a year away from a vaccine.
What that tells me then is that when the lockdowns do start
to end, as we're seeing in some parts of Europe, for example,
and of course some parts of China,
is that they will have to be ended very, very
gradually indeed to make sure that the health
systems worldwide don't get very quickly overwhelmed.