COVID19 Update - Day 257

US Tests: 156,339,040*

US Cases: 12,077,354*

US Deaths: 247,932*

Worldwide Cases: 58,563,451*

Worldwide Deaths: 1,386,465*

* - Numbers are a lower bound.  True numbers are being suppressed by the Trump administration

Another grim milestone, as the U.S. recorded its 12 millionth case of the #TrumpVirus today.  Fortunately, I am not among them.  I received my test result just about 24 hours ago, and I tested negative.  Yay!

Nevertheless, this is another reminder that things are bad and getting worse.  If we arbitrarily choose March 11 as our starting point (the date I started blogging about the virus regularly), here is the number of days it took to reach 1 million additional cases:

• One million: 49 days
• Two million: 44 days
• Three million: 27 days
• Four million: 15 days
• Five million: 17 days
• Six million: 23 days
• Seven million: 25 days
• 8 million: 20 days
• 9 million: 16 days
• 10 million: 9 days
• 11 million: 6 days
• 12 million: 6 days

With Thanksgiving right around the corner, it's not unreasonable to expect that we might see ONE MILLION NEW CASES PER DAY in the U.S. before the end of the year.

So let's take a look at how treatments/vaccines are coming along:

The emergency approval comes as two possible Covid-19 vaccines have gotten a lot of attention recently. Pfizer, creator of one of the vaccines, said it recently wrapped up its clinical trial successfully, and submitted an application for emergency approval from the FDA on Friday, while another company, Moderna, said it would be applying soon. Health officials had hoped that antibody treatments like Regeneron’s would help address cases in the time before vaccines become widely available.

Regeneron’s antibody cocktail is just one of several experimental treatments for Covid-19. There’s also convalescent plasma, which is taken from people who were infected with the virus but later recovered

. . .

[T]he FDA isn’t completely sure Regeneron’s treatment works, but in its announcement, the FDA said it “has determined that it is reasonable to believe that casirivimab and imdevimab administered together may be effective in treating patients with mild or moderate COVID-19.” Ahead of submitting the treatment for its EUA, Regeneron said it planned to continue trials that included a variety of hospitalized and nonhospitalized individuals.

This uncertainty has led some health experts to express concern about the fast-tracking process for approval of potential viral treatments. In September, the National Institutes of Health criticized the FDA’s emergency authorization for convalescent plasma, saying, “There are insufficient data to recommend either for or against the use of convalescent plasma.”

At the moment, peer reviewed research hasn’t yet been published on Regeneron’s antibody treatment, so experts can only go by data presented in company press releases purporting to show the treatment works. The FDA believes it has seen enough to allow its use, however, giving doctors one more option to consider as cases rise.

From where I sit, it looks like we need to get those vaccines to market as quickly as is safely possible.