Sweden overlooked its elderly care homes where half of the country's deaths have occurred. It did ask for voluntary cooperation with social distancing rules, but avoided coercive measures. Swedes have generally complied with their government's requests to restrict movement. Norway and Denmark, which have lower per capita rates than Sweden announced last week that they would not let Sweden into their "travel bubble" for now. Australia and New Zealand are expected to resume normal travel between them soon, since both countries have substantially controlled the contagion.
The British medical journal, The Lancet, has retracted a study of the effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine which it published after the medical community criticized the validity of data on which it was based. The report was a case study, not based on a controlled experiment. Since the publication of the paper on May 22nd, a randomized, placebo controlled experiment on the effectiveness of the antimalarial drug for treating COVID-19 has been completed and will be reported in the New England Journal of Medicine. A controlled UK study has produced a similar finding of no clinical benefit. The case study was based on hospital databases containing thousands of records. The author's analyzed the data, wrote the their paper and submitted it to peer review in just over five weeks, much faster than usual.
{3/06/20} The old anti-malarial drug the Antichist in Office hawked as a miracle cure for COVID-19, and which he once claimed to be taking as a prophylactic, has proven to be useless in the first rigorously controlled study of the drug's effect on the disease. A joint study between the USA and Canada of 821 patients showed the drug did not prevent the disease in randomly selected subjects who had were exposed. The study also employed a placebo control group, the most reliable way to determine a drug's effectiveness and safety. “The take-home message for the general public is that if you’re exposed to someone with Covid-19, hydroxychloroquine is not an effective post-exposure, preventive therapy,” the lead author of the study, Dr. David R. Boulware, from the University of Minnesota, said in an interview. The results will be published in the New England Journal of Medicine. The results confirm previous research on hydroxychloroquine.
Controversy has swirled around the off-label use of the anti-malarial compound since anecdotal reports of its effectiveness against COVID-19 reached the media. Total Douche amplified the debate when he advocated using the drug by saying, "Take it, what do have to lose?" What he failed to mention are the possible serious side-effects ranging from heart arrhythmia to hallucinations. The medical facts have not stopped him from promoting hydroxychloroquine. On Sunday, his regime announced that it was sending 2 million doses of the drug to Brazil, to treat patients and help prevent infection in health care workers. Brazil is run by a simpatico nationalist president who is also burning down the Amazon rain forest. There have been reports that members of the Trump family have financial interests in companies that manufacture the drug, and that Total Douche is a golf buddy of the drug distributor.
Another swing and a miss....
*Incredibly one in three 'Mericans turned to bleach to battle SARS CoV-2 according to the CDC. In a survey, these misguided citizens used bleach and other household disinfectants in high-risk, not recommended practices including spraying these toxic substances on food, applying on skin, inhaling and ingesting. During a nationally-televised press briefing Total Douche suggested doctors and scientists should test the “injection” of disinfectants, like bleach or alcohol, into the human body as a way to cure coronavirus. Makers of these cleaning agents immediately issued warnings against misuse of their products.