Covid-19 Update | March 25 at 11:45 PM

Today’s Corona Virus update is brought to you by Mylan Pharmaceuticals, makers of Plaquenil (hydroxychloroquine). So right after I posted last night’s update, we had two more cases of CoVID-19 in Bay County. So I’m going to throw a few numbers out there as to why its not a big deal. The cases per million in Bay County now stand at 19 per million. If Bay County were a state, we would rank 51st in cases per million right behind West Virginia. And now for the but were not testing folks… we have done 57 tests and 3 have been positive, which is a 5% positive test rate. South Korea, who tested everyone that asked, had a 4% positive test rate. So if we were only testing people who had a high likelihood of having it, the positive rate would be greater than 10%. Next, on the state level not really much change, except that we had been having 200-240 new cases a day for 4 days in a row and today we had almost 500 new cases. Why? Those days we had been doing 2-3000 tests and today we did 7000 tests, so the positive test rate actually declined from 9% to 8% due to all the negative tests even though the raw number of positive tests was the highest ever. So the numbers can lie if you don’t look at them all together. Other encouraging developments nationally are the death rate in the US is really low. We have 3 deaths per million, even though the case rate is 200 per million nationally. Even in South Korea they have a death rate of 2 death per million and same in Germany. I think having the world’s best health care system is paying dividends here. And yes I know New York is a mess, Dr. Birks said 60% of all new cases are from metro NYC. Continue to pray for them and their health care workers. Also, there is evidence out there, be it anecdotal, that the combination of plaquenil and azithromycin may be effective in preventing hospitalization. I sure know that if I tested positive, I’d want to try it. The news reports of it somehow being dangerous is ludicrous. The regimen is 10 days of plaquenil and 5 days of azithromycin. I have patients with inflammatory disease on plaquenil for years with no issues. The azithromycin is being used to prevent bacterial pneumonia which can be a complication of a viral respiratory tract infection. Signaling from both the President and our Governor is that they want to be back to business in most parts of the country the week after Easter. I believe this is going to be doable for large swaths of the country. There is a growing number of articles I’ve come across suggesting that there are a large number of asymptomatic infections and the idea is that potentially the case fatality rate is much lower than it appears. Currently, we only know the status of cases that receive tests. There could be significant herd immunity building up in the nation right now. The other issue I’ve been reading about is that people are coming around to the idea that much like other corona viruses, this one is going to have seasonality and improve in the late spring and summer. Dr. Fauci spoke of this today at the White House Press Briefing. He also warned that without a vaccine we may see improvement in the summer, just to have it peak again in the winter. I hope that’s not true, but there will be a blood test available to see if you were exposed and if you have immunity to it very soon. That’s all for today folks!