COVID-19: I’m Treating Too Many Young People for the Coronavirus
- Thread starter schizo
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Honestly, it's scummy but big pharma and countless other companies get away with worse. Why's the little guy the one that needs to be made an example of?
prime example:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/29/business/coronavirus-us-ventilator-shortage.html
Then everything changed.
The medical device industry was undergoing rapid consolidation, with one company after another merging with or acquiring other makers. Manufacturers wanted to pitch themselves as one-stop shops for hospitals, which were getting bigger, and that meant offering a broader suite of products. In May 2012, Covidien, a large medical device manufacturer, agreed to buy Newport for just over $100 million.
Covidien — a publicly traded company with sales of $12 billion that year — already sold traditional ventilators, but that was only a small part of its multifaceted businesses. In 2012 alone, Covidien bought five other medical device companies, in addition to Newport.
Newport executives and government officials working on the ventilator contract said they immediately noticed a change when Covidien took over. Developing inexpensive portable ventilators no longer seemed like a top priority.
Newport applied in June 2012 for clearance from the Food and Drug Administration to market the device, but two former federal officials said Covidien had demanded additional funding and a higher sales price for the ventilators. The government gave the company an additional $1.4 million, a drop in the bucket for a company Covidien’s size.
Government officials and executives at rival ventilator companies said they suspected that Covidien had acquired Newport to prevent it from building a cheaper product that would undermine Covidien’s profits from its existing ventilator business.
Some Newport executives who worked on the project were reassigned to other roles. Others decided to leave the company.
“Up until the time the company sold, I was really happy and excited about the project,” said Hong-Lin Du, Newport’s president at the time of its sale. “Then I was assigned to a different job.”
In 2014, with no ventilators having been delivered to the government, Covidien executives told officials at the biomedical research agency that they wanted to get out of the contract, according to three former federal officials. The executives complained that it was not sufficiently profitable for the company.
The government agreed to cancel the contract. The world was focused at the time on the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. The research agency started over, awarding a new contract for $13.8 million to the giant Dutch company Philips. In 2015, Covidien was sold for $50 billion to another huge medical device company, Medtronic. Charles J. Dockendorff, Covidien’s former chief financial officer, said he did not know why the contract had fallen apart. “I am not aware of that issue,” he said in a text message.
Robert J. White, president of the minimally invasive therapies group at Medtronic who worked at Covidien during the Newport acquisition, initially said he had no recollection of the Project Aura contract. A Medtronic spokeswoman later said that Mr. White was under the impression that the contract had been winding down before Covidien bought Newport.
Why Florida Governor is a Moron
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/02/us/coronavirus-social-distancing.html
Stay-at-home orders have nearly halted travel for most Americans, but people in Florida, the Southeast and other places that waited to enact such orders have continued to travel widely, potentially exposing more people as the coronavirus outbreak accelerates, according to an analysis of cellphone location data by The New York Times.
The divide in travel patterns, based on anonymous cellphone data from 15 million people, suggests that Americans in wide swaths of the West, Northeast and Midwest have complied with orders from state and local officials to stay home. Disease experts who reviewed the results say those reductions in travel — to less than a mile a day, on average, from about five miles — may be enough to sharply curb the spread of the coronavirus in those regions, at least for now.
“That’s huge,” said Aaron A. King, a University of Michigan professor who studies the ecology of infectious disease. “By any measure this is a massive change in behavior, and if we can make a similar reduction in the number of contacts we make, every indication is that we can defeat this epidemic.”
But not everybody has been staying home.
A half-dozen of the most populous counties where residents were traveling widely last week are in Florida, where Gov. Ron DeSantis resisted calling for a statewide lockdown until Wednesday. People in Jacksonville, Tampa, Daytona Beach, Lakeland and surrounding areas continued to travel much more than people in other parts of the country, putting those areas at a higher risk for outbreaks in the coming weeks.
In Jacksonville, the sheriff’s department had to send out officers over the weekend to break up block parties. In Spartanburg, S.C., people were still going to the hardware store to buy supplies for home-improvement projects, and pictures from children's birthday parties and playdates were being posted on Facebook. And along the shorelines in Florida and Alabama, communities that rely on tourists to help drive the economy instead looked with frustration at out-of-state license plates on the street.
“I saw people this weekend shaking hands with each other,” Lenny Curry, the mayor of Jacksonville, Florida’s largest city, told residents. “I understand, maybe it's just habit. But we've got to stop, folks. We've really got to stop this.”
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/02/us/coronavirus-social-distancing.html
Stay-at-home orders have nearly halted travel for most Americans, but people in Florida, the Southeast and other places that waited to enact such orders have continued to travel widely, potentially exposing more people as the coronavirus outbreak accelerates, according to an analysis of cellphone location data by The New York Times.
The divide in travel patterns, based on anonymous cellphone data from 15 million people, suggests that Americans in wide swaths of the West, Northeast and Midwest have complied with orders from state and local officials to stay home. Disease experts who reviewed the results say those reductions in travel — to less than a mile a day, on average, from about five miles — may be enough to sharply curb the spread of the coronavirus in those regions, at least for now.
“That’s huge,” said Aaron A. King, a University of Michigan professor who studies the ecology of infectious disease. “By any measure this is a massive change in behavior, and if we can make a similar reduction in the number of contacts we make, every indication is that we can defeat this epidemic.”
But not everybody has been staying home.
A half-dozen of the most populous counties where residents were traveling widely last week are in Florida, where Gov. Ron DeSantis resisted calling for a statewide lockdown until Wednesday. People in Jacksonville, Tampa, Daytona Beach, Lakeland and surrounding areas continued to travel much more than people in other parts of the country, putting those areas at a higher risk for outbreaks in the coming weeks.
In Jacksonville, the sheriff’s department had to send out officers over the weekend to break up block parties. In Spartanburg, S.C., people were still going to the hardware store to buy supplies for home-improvement projects, and pictures from children's birthday parties and playdates were being posted on Facebook. And along the shorelines in Florida and Alabama, communities that rely on tourists to help drive the economy instead looked with frustration at out-of-state license plates on the street.
“I saw people this weekend shaking hands with each other,” Lenny Curry, the mayor of Jacksonville, Florida’s largest city, told residents. “I understand, maybe it's just habit. But we've got to stop, folks. We've really got to stop this.”
It is interesting the death rates are consistent between California and the US, both ~2%.
California seems able to flatten the curve whereas NY and the East Coast are having trouble.
Our hearts go out to the heroic healthcare workers in NYC and everywhere, risking their lives to save others.
Right now, only 32,630 people have been hospitalized for the coronavirus out of 239,000 cases tested positive. 20,800 of those hospitalized happened in NY. Think about that next time you praise Cuomo for the "good job he's doing"
Only 12k hospitalized in the other 49 states. That's literally nothing.
Only 12k hospitalized in the other 49 states. That's literally nothing.
Tales of TWO STATES. Data modeled by the epidemiologists at the University of Washington.
New York State:
California:
And California is more populous than New York state.
C'mon, give the poor guy some slack. After all, New York City being the most populous city in the US, this was bound to happen. Thankfully, he took preemptive measures when Trump was still in denial.
pop density though? NY is tiny