Greetings Y'all,
When I read the following message from the Politico Nightly - Health Desk, I found it enlightening as it explained how all the parties involved pulled together their collective expertise to create the first Covid-19 vaccine within one year. As I thought about the following information, it caused me to wonder what the progress would be in the research of treatments for APCa could be if some of the barriers to new treatments were adjusted and relaxed? See what you think.
FROM THE HEALTH DESK
HOLIDAY SPIKE — For the first time since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, daily reported U.S. deaths topped 3,000 on Dec. 9, at 3,142, with a record 7-day rolling daily average of 2,275 deaths. Texas led the nation with a weekly average of 189 deaths per day, while South Dakota had the highest average daily deaths per 1 million population, at nearly 25.
Graphic of daily Covid-19 deaths, shown as 7-day rolling average as of Dec. 9
COVID MED SCHOOL — The novel coronavirus is called “novel” for a reason. Nobody had ever seen it before.
So how did doctors learn how to treat it? Joanne Kenen , our health care editor at large, tells Nightly she had been wondering about this for months: As doctors gained more experience with a virus far more complex than initially believed, how did they share insights with fellow clinicians? And as they worked themselves to exhaustion (physical and emotional), how did they keep up with the avalanche of science about the virus and the disease — which turned out to be way more complicated than it first appeared, involving not just the lungs but the heart, kidneys and brain, among other organs? And sometimes morphing into a chronic condition that’s still not well understood?
So Joanne gathered experts (including one physician serving in Congress) and asked them a lot of questions at a POLITICO Live event this week. And most of what she learned, she tells us, was reassuring: The flow of information is not perfect, but it’s been good and it’s been fast. Care guidelines that used to take months to write now take weeks. Preprints — manuscripts that have not yet been peer reviewed but are made public — are spreading findings and stimulating debate, although more needs to be done to make it absolutely clear that these postings are still science-in-progress. Dozens of medical specialty societies are coordinating and collaborating. The CDC has helped fund the Covid Learning Collaborative, which has become a one-stop destination for clinicians in multiple fields to tap into the collective (and scientifically sound) research.
The groups pulling this all together are not only sending out information; they are also asking the caregivers in the trenches what they need.
Nor are these tools open only to physicians at elite academic institutions. A GP in a small town in rural America can tap in just as easily as a senior physician at Johns Hopkins. Nor are doctors the only parties to these conversations — nurses, pharmacists and others involved in saving the lives of Covid patients join in.
Social media can be a double-edged sword. Bad interpretations of pre-prints (or bad pre-prints) go viral. But overall, there’s plenty of good stuff — often curated by highly-regarded experts — on Twitter and Facebook. Some websites with guidelines have gotten as many as 1.7 million hits. Webinars get 6,000 or 7,000 views. Tens of thousands of health care professionals join moderated Facebook groups.
Rep. Ami Bera, a California Democrat and physician who took part in the POLITICO event, says the government needs to fund and facilitate these kind of initiatives — and think about how to capture some of the pandemic-driven energy and innovation to start working on the next problems — both those that we know are coming, like antibiotic resistance, and the unknown ones that we will inevitably confront.
“The federal government should have been a clearinghouse of information, pushing out the best practices as we got that information,” Bera said, and coordinating better with the international community.
Asked about how his colleagues on the Hill have learned about the virus, Bera said many have absorbed a lot of scientific information about testing, treatment and now vaccines.
But not everyone. Sometimes when he tries to talk to a mask-shunning colleague, he lamented, “It’s like talking to a brick wall.”
If you want to know more, watch the full session. Besides Bera, the guests were Jessica Polka, executive director as ASAPbio, Helen Burstin, CEO of the Council of Medical Specialty Societies and Johns Hopkins’ Natasha Mubeen Chida, the medical editor of the COVID-19 Real Time Learning Network.
