Timely response saved us from COVID carnage

4 minute read

COVID-19

By

Penny Durham

Plus Trump's great drugs and another CDC reversal.

Welcome to The Medical Republic‘s COVID Catch-Up.

It’s the day’s COVID-19 news in one convenient post. Email bianca@biancanogrady.com (who will be back tomorrow) with any tips, comments or feedback.

6 October

  • Australia would have lost tens of thousands more lives if its response had been like that in England and Wales, according to a preprint in the Medical Journal of Australia from researchers at the University of Sydney and Westmead Millennium Institute for Medical Research.
    They estimated the number of excess deaths that might have occurred in Australia if our outbreaks had been on a similar scale. Using baseline all-cause mortality estimates based on 2014-18 averages, and a relative risk for dying from COVID-19 based on data from England and Wales during the March-May peak, stratified by age and sex, they found Australia would have had more than 16,300 additional deaths by the end of May – 9295 men and 7018 women. By that point we had had 103.
    Even with the Victorian second wave, our death rate has been 15-20 times lower than those seen across Europe and America, the authors write.
    “This enormous difference underlies the importance of Australia’s response using a combination of extensive testing and contact tracing, mandatory quarantine of people returning from overseas, and shutdowns to control community transmission. While acknowledging that these measures carry with them substantial social and economic harms, we wish to highlight the scale of the loss of life avoided.”
  • The Lancet has published results from the UK’s RECOVERY trial, which found patients treated with the lopinavir/ritonavir combination fared no better than those on usual care. The antiviral group showed no reduction in 28-day mortality, length of hospital stay or progression to mechanical ventilation.
  • We’re still trying to digest the weekend’s information salad about US President Donald Trump’s condition.
    If you’d hoped, as public health experts had, that a chastened Trump would preach caution about the virus that has killed almost 210,000 of his people, you’d be disappointed. No biggie, he tweeted:


The “great drugs” he received included an antibody duo made by Regeneron, which published its early results claiming it “reduced viral load and the time to alleviate symptoms” in non-hospitalised COVID-19 patients: “The greatest treatment benefit was in patients who had not mounted their own effective immune response, suggesting that REGN-COV2 could provide a therapeutic substitute for the naturally-occurring immune response,” Regeneron’s president Dr George D. Yancopoulos said. Nice if you can get it.
He also reportedly received the steroid dexamethasone, which may have had some side effects.

For those trying to keep count, Statista has produced this handy chart of all the world leaders who’ve copped a dose of corona (at least the ones who’ve copped to it):

Infographic: World Leaders Who Contracted Covid-19 | Statista

  • Meanwhile heads must be spinning in Atlanta, where the CDC has finally conceded the virus can sometimes be spread by airborne transmission, not only via large droplets. It follows a notice on 18 September to this effect that was removed three days later having been posted in error, according to CDC officials.
    This in turn follows CDC advice about virus testing that said people should not be tested after known exposure to the virus unless they had symptoms. This notice, which flew in the face of the expert advice, was said to have come straight from the health department, bypassing scientific review, and was repudiated by the CDC’s own officials before being revised.
    No wonder Americans are drinking more.
  • Things are certainly looking up in NSW, which has recorded 11 days without a locally acquired case.
    Here are the latest confirmed COVID-19 infection numbers from around Australia to 9pm Monday:
    National – 27,149, with 894 deaths
    ACT – 113 (0)
    NSW – 4235 (1)
    NT – 33 (0)
    QLD – 1160 (0)
    SA – 471 (0)
    TAS – 230 (0)
    VIC – 20,220 (9)
    WA – 687 (1)

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