So now the range from covidtracking to CDC is 6,400 to 8,100. It’s kind of crazy that there’s a big question mark on the cause of death for 1,700 people in just that one week.

But of special interest is that they also guess we are now past the peak of hospital resource use, which means that particular rationale for restrictions to flatten the curve may be weakening, even assuming that all those resources are doing a lot of good.

The deaths numbers vary a bit from covidtracking, and it is probably a mistake at this point to work with higher than 2 or 3 digit precision about anything.

For the week ending 4/4, covidtracking had cv19-attributed 6,378 deaths, UW has 7,253 but CDC provisional death counts now show 6,955 for that week, and an additional 800 more pneumonia deaths than typical, but not classified as cv19.

6,400 to 7,800 (That is, 7100 +/- 10%) is quite a range for something we can count (dead bodies) and (theoretically) confirm one way or the other with testing, even if it’s on samples post-mortem.

I thought that convalescent plasma was at least promising enough in case studies to try to do proper studies.

Also, to what extent might doctors simply better learn how to manage symptoms of the disease well enough to shorten duration and lower the fatality rate? Wasn’t the ventilator/oxygen protocol just changed due to ventilators doing more harm than good in a lot of patients? Might there be a couple of other things like this that change the calculus of trying to restrict the viruses spread versus the harms of restricting normal activities?

Another assumption that I think is worth mentioning is that we don’t discover a good treatment for the virus over the next month or two.

That is a safe assumption.

The closest thing we might have to a small molecule drug treatment is remdesivir, and I looked up the details of its synthesis and Gilead’s statements about what might be available, and this won’t be available in the bulk quantity needed to treat the predicted numbers for at least late Summer, and it might not even be all that effective anyway.

There isn’t going to be a vaccine even chosen for scaleup and use for at least another 3 months, and this is assuming a vaccine is even possible for this virus, which isn’t a guarantee- you don’t have effective vaccines for other member of this family, nor other respiratory ailments caused by rhinoviridae, for example. I think it is fool’s errand to make a plan for shutting down until a vaccine arrives, and at the rate the virus is spreading even in lockdowns, it probably wouldn’t work even if you did get a vaccine in a year available to the public.

There are claimed treatments for the cytokine storm that is claimed to be the main cause of a lot of the deaths- namely anti-interleukin-6 antibodies and antagonists for the IL-6 receptor itself, but the evidence is all that convincing that this works. There are other targets for intervention in the immune response, but I don’t think you would find anything that works very quickly, and you would have to choose from things that already have FDA approval.

I have waiting to see the results of blood serum treatments derived from COVID-19 survivors, but nothing promising has been revealed that I have seen, and this makes me suspect it isn’t working well.