President Donald Trump indicated that he is now considering imposing an enforceable quarantine on New York, parts of New Jersey and parts of Connecticut to curb the spread of the coronavirus.
“We’d like to see New York quarantined because it’s a hotspot — New York, New Jersey, maybe one or two other places, certain parts of Connecticut quarantined,” he said outside the White House.“I’m thinking about that right now. We might not have to do it but there’s a possibility that sometime today we’ll do a quarantine — short term two weeks for New York, probably New Jersey and parts of Connecticut.”He said that if such a move happened, it would be primarily a restriction on residents of those states traveling to other parts of the country.”This will be an enforceable quarantine, but hopefully we won’t need it,” he said.
Meanwhile, while the Chinese are reporting that their country has completely turned to normal, new information about funeral urns raises questions on the reliability of those reports.
As families in the central Chinese city began picking up the cremated ashes of those who have died from the virus this week, photos began circulating on social media and local media outlets showing vast numbers of urns at Wuhan funeral homes.China has reported 3,299 coronavirus-related deaths, with most taking place in Wuhan, the epicenter of the global pandemic. But one funeral home received two shipments of 5,000 urns over the course of two days, according to the Chinese media outlet Caixin.It’s not clear how many of the urns were filled.Workers at several funeral parlors declined to provide any details to Bloomberg as to how many urns were waiting to be collected, saying they either did not know or were not authorized to share the number.
Rapid testing will be a key component to identifying infections, so that effective choices about isolation can be made.
A five-minute, point-of-care coronavirus test could be coming to hospitals next week, and experts say it could be “game-changing.”The U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued Emergency Use Authorization to Illinois-based medical device maker Abbott Labs on Friday for a coronavirus test that delivers positive results in as little as five minutes and negative results in 13 minutes, the company said.The company expects the tests to be available next week and expects to ramp up manufacturing to deliver 50,000 tests per day, according to a press release.
Rapid testing paired with an effective, readily-available, and safe treatment will be critical in reducing mortality and speeding recoveries for those infected.
Many Legal Insurrection readers will have heard about the French team and their initial study involving 36 patients. This is a follow-up study on the malaria-drug (hydroxychlorquine) paired with an antibiotic (azithromycin). Prof. Didier Raoult and his team have just published results of their new study of 80 patients.
In 80 in-patients receiving a combination of hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin, the team found a clinical improvement in all but one 86 year-old patient who died, and one 74-year old patient still in intensive care unit. The team also found that, by administering hydroxychloroquine combined with azithromycin, they were able to observe an improvement in all cases, except in one patient who arrived with an advanced form, who was over the age of 86, and in whom the evolution was irreversible, according to a new paper published today in IHU Méditerranée Infection.“For all other patients in the cohort of 80 people, the combination of hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin resulted in a clinical improvement that appeared significant when compared to the natural evolution in patients with a definite outcome, as described in the literature. In a cohort of 191 Chinese inpatients, of whom 95% received antibiotics and 21% received an association of lopinavir and ritonavir, the median duration of fever was 12 days and that of cough 19 days in survivors, with a 28% case-fatality rate (18),” the team said.The team went on to say: “Thus, in addition to its direct therapeutic role, this association can play a role in controlling the disease epidemic by limiting the duration of virus shedding, which can last for several weeks in the absence of specific treatment. In our Institute, which contains 75 individual rooms for treating highly contagious patients, we currently have a turnover rate of 1/3 which allows us to receive a large number of these contagious patients with early discharge. Chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine are extremely well-known drugs which have already been prescribed to billions of people.”“In conclusion, we confirm the efficacy of hydroxychloroquine associated with azithromycin in the treatment of COVID-19 and its potential effectiveness in the early impairment of contagiousness. Given the urgent therapeutic need to manage this disease with effective and safe drugs and given the negligible cost of both hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin, we believe that other teams should urgently evaluate this therapeutic strategy both to avoid the spread of the disease and to treat patients before severe irreversible respiratory complications take hold,” the team concluded.
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