• Shawn
    13.2k


    It's available via prescription also. But, Alibaba is the go to place for your anticorona infection treatments in bulk.

    What's 49 USD for some peace of mind?
  • god must be atheist
    5.1k
    Absolutely. I don't know how much the same thing costs in US dispensaries. $5? $5,000,000.99?
  • god must be atheist
    5.1k
    be aware of the fact, too, that once I picked up a guy in my taxi, and he was cussing and cursing, because he gave $60 to a hooker to get him some rocks. She said to him, "Wait here", and a few minutes later reappeared with some of the stuff. Which turned out to be nothing but little pebbles -- silicon pebbles. Chinese are just like everyone else, nothing worse, nothing better, so... Caveat Emptor.
  • Shawn
    13.2k


    The psychopathic chiefs would want it to cost 5 million; but, it's an old drug also known as Plaquenil, available at CVS, Costco, and elsewhere.
  • god must be atheist
    5.1k
    Right. Thanks. I'll price them now.
  • Shawn
    13.2k


    Nah. Man. The Chinese have higher ethical standards than US, and the online labs retailing on Alibaba with a trade assurance policy all have a solid and sound reputation.
  • Shawn
    13.2k


    Use a coupon code website like goodRx.com if you want it cheap.
  • Nobeernolife
    556
    He called the State Department the Deep State Department.Michael

    That is a pretty clever quip. If you could look outside your TDS bubble, you would agree with that.
  • Nobeernolife
    556
    Nah. Man. The Chinese have higher ethical standards than US,Shawn

    You mean the CCP? The one that jailed people for months for talking about Corona? Seriously???
  • god must be atheist
    5.1k
    results for: 60 tablets HYDROXYCHLOROQUINE SULFATE 200 MG Tablet near 77381

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    These are the prices for the French Protocol for one person.

    If you have more than two people in your household, @Shawn, and fewer than 9, then you made a good purchase.
  • god must be atheist
    5.1k
    You mean the CCP? The one that jailed people for months for talking about Corona? Seriously???Nobeernolife

    @Noobernolife, you are mixing up ethics with human rights again. Granted, they have to do something with each other.
  • Shawn
    13.2k


    If you have membership with Ralph's, it comes out to be something like 14 USD for 90 tablets @ 200mg.
  • Nobeernolife
    556
    you are mixing up ethics with human rights again. Granted, they have to do something with each other.god must be atheist

    Human rights are part of ethics. What are you talking about?
  • Punshhh
    2.6k
    I think the quaranteening movement actually can stop the virus from spreading. If all people who have got it are quaranteened for three weeks, the virus will die in them. Some will die with the virus, but the virus in the survivors also will die.

    Yes hopefully this is true, but it's not that simple because the virus might go into out of the way parts of the body of some people and become dormant and then emerge again later on.
  • NOS4A2
    9.2k
    The fatality rate of covid19 in Wuhan, China is now down to 1.4%, according to a Nature study.

    But some suspect it will be even lower, possibly lower than seasonal flu. Dr. John P. A. Ioannidis recently wrote:

    This evidence fiasco creates tremendous uncertainty about the risk of dying from Covid-19. Reported case fatality rates, like the official 3.4% rate from the World Health Organization, cause horror — and are meaningless. Patients who have been tested for SARS-CoV-2 are disproportionately those with severe symptoms and bad outcomes. As most health systems have limited testing capacity, selection bias may even worsen in the near future.

    The one situation where an entire, closed population was tested was the Diamond Princess cruise ship and its quarantine passengers. The case fatality rate there was 1.0%, but this was a largely elderly population, in which the death rate from Covid-19 is much higher.

    Projecting the Diamond Princess mortality rate onto the age structure of the U.S. population, the death rate among people infected with Covid-19 would be 0.125%. But since this estimate is based on extremely thin data — there were just seven deaths among the 700 infected passengers and crew — the real death rate could stretch from five times lower (0.025%) to five times higher (0.625%). It is also possible that some of the passengers who were infected might die later, and that tourists may have different frequencies of chronic diseases — a risk factor for worse outcomes with SARS-CoV-2 infection — than the general population. Adding these extra sources of uncertainty, reasonable estimates for the case fatality ratio in the general U.S. population vary from 0.05% to 1%.

    https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/17/a-fiasco-in-the-making-as-the-coronavirus-pandemic-takes-hold-we-are-making-decisions-without-reliable-data/
  • boethius
    2.3k
    But some suspect it will be even lower, possibly lower than seasonal flu. Dr. John P. A. Ioannidis Recently wrote:NOS4A2

    What a complete idiot; can't believe this guy is correlated with the word "statistics". That's academia for you.

    His reasoning is completely preposterous.

    After explaining why sampling bias creates large uncertainties, which is true, that without good estimates of the infection fatality rate, no optimum strategy can be constructed. True. An honest intellectual would have pointed out why it was so critical to contain as effectively as possible during the initial outbreak to buy time to get good information to make good decisions.

    But, either due to being a dishonest intellectual or then just a complete idiot, he does not want to inform his readers that people in charge completely dropped the ball during the initial phase where containment was still possible to either contain or at least significantly slow.

    He really, really wants to criticize people who don't have an optimistic reading of the numbers, which he himself goes to some length to explain that there's not enough information to get a good estimate on way or another -- but insists on emphasizing only a rosy reading.

    This leads up to his key premise which is as follows:

    The most valuable piece of information for answering those questions would be to know the current prevalence of the infection in a random sample of a population and to repeat this exercise at regular time intervals to estimate the incidence of new infections. Sadly, that’s information we don’t have.John Ioannidis

    From this premise the reasonable conclusion is that sort of random testing should be carried out! so that it goes from being information we don't have to information we have. That should then be the end of his reasoning line: if we want better decisions we need better data which will require more testing capability as well as randomized testing. Another example of things that can't be done early on when testing is outsourced to a crony who then does a crappy job.

    Instead of informing his readers that the Trump administration does have the power to do this, and therefore should do it, he instead criticizes people for "preparing for the worst scenario".

    In the absence of data, prepare-for-the-worst reasoning leads to extreme measures of social distancing and lockdowns. Unfortunately, we do not know if these measures work.John Ioannidis

    Is his next sentence. What the hell is this? Most measures of social distancing are uncontroversial in that they work.

    Epidemiologists, which this dufous apparently is, all agree social distancing measures work at reducing transmission rates. "Shelter in place" obviously works at reducing infection rates.

    By focusing on one edge case of schools, where there is room for some debate, doesn't cast shade on all the other extreme measures of self-isolation and large scale quarantines. This is just completely dishonest argumentation to imply all social distancing measures have the same uncertainty as school closings; however, a numerical model recently leaked does show school closing as being effective, so, in order to keep "the uncertainty is the same" perspective he would need to at least provide a numerical model showing school closings are counter productive, which he doesn't because he's lazy and stupid.

    School closures, for example, may reduce transmission rates. But they may also backfire if children socialize anyhow, if school closure leads children to spend more time with susceptible elderly family members, if children at home disrupt their parents ability to work, and more. School closures may also diminish the chances of developing herd immunity in an age group that is spared serious disease.John Ioannidis

    Maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe.

    This is simply wishful thinking analysis.

    The expression "Hope for the best, prepare for the worst" he basically wants to change to "Hope for the best, and also prepare the best".

    It's completely reasonable to prepare for a worst case scenario if the Trump administration doesn't carry out the randomized testing that the author wants. That's the reasonable conclusions to the "room for doubt" that he brings up: "The administration is completely incompetent, the infection rate is out of control and not tracked correctly, we don't know what will happen, policy reactions will not be optimum leading to high second order risks in terms of economic and social disruption fallout."

    Yes, a rosy scenario is still possible, that "it's not so bad".

    But a black scenario is also still possible. Health-care workers are disproportionately affected, have much higher infection rates due to close proximity and starting to run out of protective gear already in the first weeks of the crisis, and death rates and "just them older doctors" we should care about dying more than is needed, as they have a lot of experienced their loss represents long term damage to the health system. The capacity of the health care system is not constant through a "acute" overload, but could be significantly damaged leading to a protracted under capacity to deal with other disease anyways; the author does not mention the benefits he points out in his rosy scenario are not assured, but also unknown, since the author is unable to think critically. In an overloaded scenario many more young people may die without treatment; this number is also unknown, extrapolating from the cruise ship numbers is not a valid proxy to the "run wild" hypothesis. Letting it run rampant also maximizes the probability and also evolutionary pressure to mutate into something worse. Long term damage to lungs and other organs is also among the things unknown at this point, especially without treatment which would result from no social distancing. Also critically, re-infection, due to losing immunity in a relatively short time or then mutation, is also unknown; so, letting the virus run rampant cannot be assumed to provide everyone immunity, and the virus may come back as a second wave pandemic putting us back to square one but with a severely damaged health system and maybe a worse virus to deal with.

    That the black scenarios can't be ruled out is why all the measures being seen are taken by every country that has an exponential outbreak, and strict quarantine and travel restriction are being put in place by countries that do, as another social distancing measures, and countries that don't in order to carry out the containment strategy competently to buy time to prepare and learn from failed policy cases; including now Trump! is doing some extreme social distancing like stopping planes, and various states individually as well are going more extreme to fill the policy gaps!

    The idea of "letting it run its course" was investigated, governments put competent statisticians on the job; no country would be stopping nearly all economic activity if rosy scenarios weren't essentially all ruled out at this point. The author doesn't mention this, because the author wittingly or unwittingly, wants his readers to imagine that government's just listen to lefty snowflake twitter users to make decisions.


    Wha't the reasoning for attacking Trump's own decisions now of taking things "super seriously", indeed deciding to have taken it super seriously from the beginning and now implementing severe measures? That the "libs got so loud that Trump was forced to act on the left's snowflake delusions." It's a crazy line of argument to imagine that the left is actually in charge, somehow, now that the stock market it tanking and Trump is no longer "sticking it to the left" by downplaying the pandemic as "just a flu".

    It's the most stupendous feet of double think that I have so far witnessed in the political scene.

    If you want to criticize the reaction, criticize the administration that is currently in charge of the reaction.

    If you want to criticize the lack of data needed to create a optimum strategy in terms of "life lost from the virus" and "life lost due to reactive and overdone policies affecting the economy", then criticize the administration for A. abandoning effective containment and contact tracing so that little time was bought to figure out the information needed B. fumbling the layup "make tests available" to do random sampling as well as track symptomatic cases and C. not doing random sampling testing even now to have a clear idea of what the situation is now.
  • Benkei
    7.7k
    The fatality rate is actually not even that important at the moment. It's the fact nobody has immunity and enough are sick enough that they require hospital care that will demand all the healthcare capacity a country has. The knock-on deaths because of that will mean deaths that can be attributed to corona will greatly increase.

    But anyhoo, good to see spending a few billions to save lives is more an issue than spending trillions on wars.
  • god must be atheist
    5.1k
    It's the fact nobody has immunity and enough are sick enough that they require hospital care that will demand all the healthcare capacity a country has.Benkei

    Eventually it will also come to deathcare. Who will bury the survivors? The funeral homes and cementery workers will be pushed to their limit of capacity. In both showing compassion and physical strength.

    Jewish people will be extra hard hit in funeral arrangements, because they have to bury their dead in 24 hours after the event. There will be a bidding war, whose dearly departed will be seen to the last rites before the other one, and before the 24 hours run out. Funeral directors will have to work round the clock, and there isn't enough manpower to man the station, the crematoria, the plot digging, the stone erecting, stone carving, prayers, etc. etc. Some cemeteries have no extra plots... and so an and so forth.

    Some segments of the economy will suffer a sudden death or premature death: old folks homes, walker- and wheelchair manufacturing and distributing industry, seeing that for a short while there won't be old people.
  • boethius
    2.3k
    The fatality rate is actually not even that important at the moment. It's the fact nobody has immunity and enough are sick enough that they require hospital care that will demand all the healthcare capacity a country has. The knock-on deaths because of that will mean deaths that can be attributed to corona will greatly increase.Benkei

    Yes, but only because the rosy scenarios have clearly been essentially ruled out by nearly everyone who's following along. The author is still a hold out for roses literally raining down from the sky upon us.

    The author goes to some length to try to show a scenario where the CFR is not so much worse than the flu, as well as a rosy scenario where, even if it wasn't, just "letting it pass" will save more lives as the health system can at least get back to treating everything else quickly.

    The CFR not mattering is only above a threshold, that has clearly been passed but this author doesn't accept, since the author still tries to dance under this threshold by making very large range of estimates, based on cherry picking even among the data that's currently available, and then saying: "see, it could be super low, still just in the noise of normal coughs that kill old people all the time".

    So, given this advanced state of delusions, my answer focused on the main problem with this reasoning, even just internally assuming his estimates, which is that "well, it could be super high too; obviously", and that equally obviously "not having the information" the author wants is not some necessary fact of the situation we just have to deal with by underplaying things, but a choice by leaders. That we don't have the information is a criticism of the people not going and getting the information, not a criticism of the people worried that things may be on the worse end of the wide estimate windows as well as everything else the author doesn't consider.

    There's also the possibility governments aren't flying as blind as the author thinks, but have gotten out and gotten the information, but haven't published it because it isn't good and we can deduce it isn't good because of the policies being put into place.

    But yes, there's so much wrong in this "statistician's" analysis that we could go basically sentence by sentence and demonstrating cherry picked data, making factually incorrect statements such as social distancing "we don't know will work", unsupported conclusions from his own premises, not balancing the rosy scenario of "it could be on the low end" with black scenarios of "it could be on the high end".
  • god must be atheist
    5.1k
    Human rights are part of ethics. What are you talking about?Nobeernolife

    You're right. I was wrong.
  • god must be atheist
    5.1k
    you are mixing up ethics with human rights again. Granted, they have to do something with each other.
    — god must be atheist

    Human rights are part of ethics. What are you talking about?
    Nobeernolife

    Oh, I remember now. They may have suppressed the individual rights of the human beings, but the quality control over chemical manufacturing, esp. over pill industry, may be stringent. I DON'T KNOW THIS, AND I AM NOT MAKING ANY CLAIMS. I am just presenting it as a possibility.

    As such, the human rights may be the pits, but that does not NECESSARILY influence the quality of medical drugs they produce.

    That's what I had in mind. Again, you may be perfectly right, I don't know any facts what goes on in China.
  • boethius
    2.3k
    But anyhoo, good to see spending a few billions to save lives is more an issue than spending trillions on wars.Benkei

    I don't think this is quite fair. If they could have just given the airlines billions to solve the problem; some expensive device that instantly diagnoses flyers and so you can contain perfectly, then they would have spent that money gladly.

    The problem was that effective containment of stopping 10 to 20 percent of world air travel would have depressed the airline and boeing and airbus stock temporarily.

    War spending is also short term stimulus and hand outs to a lot of cronies. All pandemic responses are anti-economic stimulus and only permit hand outs to relatively few cronies.

    Now that the problem has advanced to a crisis big enough to hand out trillions of dollars to their cronies in every industry, they're pretty quick on the draw. Not that they consciously chose for things to play out until this point, just that there was no visible action points until now.
  • Benkei
    7.7k
    Yes, I'm sure his work is bad but I guess my point was that even if he was right it still didn't matter. So the whole discussion becomes a distraction from the fact that the Trump administration dropped the ball.
  • Benkei
    7.7k
    I don't think this is quite fair. If they could have just given the airlines billions to solve the problem; some expensive device that instantly diagnoses flyers and so you can contain perfectly, then they would have spent that money gladly.boethius

    I sincerely doubt it but we'll never know. It's just interesting to me that approaches are discussed in terms of economics and its long term effects. Where was that discussion going into Iraq, Afghanistan, war on drugs etc. Etc.?
  • Benkei
    7.7k
    Btw, I have no clue how we're avoiding lock down in the Netherlands.
  • frank
    15.7k
    We also know that for every positive test, there are about 10 asymptomatic infections. That's

    1. Why the wave of sick people ramps up so high so quickly, and
    2. Why herd immunity takes over so quickly after that.

    It's a bump in the road, not a plague.
  • boethius
    2.3k
    Yes, I'm sure his work is bad but I guess my point was that even if he was right it still didn't matter. So the whole discussion becomes a distraction from the fact that the Trump administration dropped the ball.Benkei

    Normally this is the case for the kind of comment the author makes. But the author does his utmost cleverest to be even stupider, and throws out scenarios like :

    If we assume that case fatality rate among individuals infected by SARS-CoV-2 is 0.3% in the general population — a mid-range guess from my Diamond Princess analysis — and that 1% of the U.S. population gets infected (about 3.3 million people), this would translate to about 10,000 deaths. — idiot

    So this is why the usual response of "1 percent is still huge" doesn't work for this author.

    But we're in agreement, I was writing just the first-order argumentative mistakes for people that would otherwise take it as serious analysis.

    I sincerely doubt it but we'll never know.Benkei

    Yes, we may never know, but if the problem was indeed "hyped" by the left-wing, and billions of dollars could be given to the airlines to save "a few lives", I think it would be carried out, a win-win scenario: politicians "acted", airlines and whoever provides the tech stock goes up, people's lives saved.

    It's just interesting to me that approaches are discussed in terms of economics and its long term effects. Where was that discussion going into Iraq, Afghanistan, war on drugs etc. Etc.?Benkei

    Definitely, but I think my explanation more or less covers it: wars, including the drug war, are fuel for corruption and has at least some short term economic stimulus of spending cash. They also create groups of people "to blame" for things and achieve these sorts of propaganda objectives over a long time frame.

    Yes, granted that the virus came from China creates a little propaganda opportunity, but ultimately the incompetence of managing the crisis at every subsequent point to the Chinese coverup cannot be blamed on the Chinese. It's like if I push you and you then go jump off a cliff 100 meters away; yes I shouldn't have pushed you, but my action isn't related to your self-harming actions later. Even Trump supporters may be able to see this obvious logic considering the time frame is so short; many are impressively immune, updating their beliefs Trump is not to blame for anything in real time, but we will see if this applies to all members of the flock.
  • boethius
    2.3k
    We also know that for every positive test, there are about 10 asymptomatic infections. That's

    1. Why the wave of sick people ramps up so high so quickly, and
    2. Why herd immunity takes over so quickly after that.
    frank

    This is not a correct analysis, even if the premise "there are about 10 asymptomatics" is true.

    Asymptomatic's refer only to people who do not have symptoms when they are tested. They do not include people who were asymptomatic when they were tested and then went on to develop symptoms.

    1. In an exponentially expanding phase -- an acceleration phase of a logistics curve of total past-and-present-infected, for those who think Musk has a meaningful contribution to the conversation -- it is to be expected to find lot's of asymptotics as the population of newly-infected is much larger than the population where the disease has progressed to a state of symptoms. So statistics will point in this direction, but it is an illusion.

    2. Herd immunity will take over at some point; true, but not necessarily quickly. It is not guaranteed it would take over after the first wave. The first wave may setup a second, third, fourth, and n'th wave that can be as bad or worse than the first wave. Some diseases do not provide long term immunity even if you get them and recover, and mutation can get around immunity.

    It's a bump in the road, not a plague.frank

    I have never even used the word plague, so great straw man.

    But in anycase, a pointless truism. If your standard is the "black plague"; sure, not a plague on that scale; if you want to move the goalposts to the black plague, go ahead; no one's being saying it's as bad as the black plague here.

    What matters, in terms of policy response, is if the fatality rate is higher than society's willingness to just tolerate it and just go about its business. And the ecological definition of a plague fits what's happening and why we're seeing severe policy responses.

    Now, if you think society should just "tolerate it" then make that argument. If you think, well no something must be done, but it's just a "bump", in terms of deaths and economic disruption, on a larger historic timescale, then explain what size bump it is and why things will normalize quickly on the time-scale you're considering.
  • frank
    15.7k
    It's not clear to me what your point is. If it's that somebody should have done things differently, I dont see a lot of value in that kind of 20-20 hindsight. People always do the best they can with what they know. People make mistakes. Move on.

    That way you have energy to deal with with what you've got. I'm in an emergency room now preparing for a 12 hour shift. Wish me luck. :)
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