Donald's made up #s of only 150,000 to 250,000 american dead will become a reality
but only on the way to a much larger figure. Almost all of this was so preventable we
had a epidemiologist in place in China until the summer of 2019 and her job was to be
on the look out for diseases such as C-19 but the CDC under Trump fired her.
We could have already been working on a vaccine, the antibody treatments for the disease*,
producing and stock piling the needed medical equipment, and having the W.H.O.'s C-19 testing
kits in place so we could have tracked the disease before its "breakout."
* Some Hope from Nature: How blood from coronavirus survivors might save lives
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00895-8
New York City researchers hope antibody-rich plasma can keep people out of intensive care.
Hospitals in New York City are gearing up to use the blood of people who have recovered from COVID-19 as a possible antidote for the disease. Researchers hope that the century-old approach of infusing patients with the antibody-laden blood of those who have survived an infection will help the metropolis — now the US epicentre of the outbreak — to avoid the fate of Italy, where intensive-care units (ICUs) are so crowded that doctors have turned away patients who need ventilators to breathe.
The efforts follow studies in China that attempted the measure with plasma — the fraction of blood that contains antibodies, but not red blood cells — from people who had recovered from COVID-19. But these studies have reported only preliminary results so far. The convalescent-plasma approach has also seen modest success during past severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and Ebola outbreaks — but US researchers are hoping to increase the value of the treatment by selecting donor blood that is packed with antibodies and giving it to the patients who are most likely to benefit.
A key advantage to convalescent plasma is that it’s available immediately, whereas drugs and vaccines take months or years to develop. Infusing blood in this way seems to be relatively safe, provided that it is screened for viruses and other infectious agents. Scientists who have led the charge to use plasma want to deploy it now as a stopgap measure, to keep serious infections at bay and hospitals afloat as a tsunami of cases comes crashing their way.
snip
Arturo Casadevall, an immunologist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, has been fighting to use blood as a COVID-19 treatment since late January, as the disease spread to other countries and no surefire therapy was in sight. Scientists refer to this measure as ‘passive antibody therapy’ because a person receives external antibodies, rather than generating an immune response themselves, as they would following a vaccination.
= new reply since forum marked as read
this is real
