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Gloomy Coronavirus Forecasts Ignore American Innovative Genius
Vice President Mike Pence, who heads the government’s coronavirus task force, on a tour of 3M’s Innovation Center in Maplewood, MN, March 5, 2020.
Of course, it’s easier to make forecasts if you assume none of that stuff is going to happen. That tomorrow will be pretty much the same as today. But such forecasts will miss a lot. A vibrant and open democratic capitalist society will have a powerful, bottom-up reaction function. In Thursday’s Wall Street Journal, a Greg Ip piece includes this great quote from Northwestern University economic historian Joel Mokyr: “We have this huge reservoir of creative energy spread around the economy. When you have an event like this all of a sudden, everyone says, ‘Oh wow let’s look at this problem let’s see what I can do to solve it.’”
Among the examples cited by Ip: True Value hardware retooling a paint factory to make hand sanitizer. GM teaming up with Ventec Life Systems to manufacture ventilators. Biotech company Moderna already running human trials on a vaccine, just two months after the COVID-19 genome was sequenced.
Or take the problem of delivering adequate virus testing. Cascading economic damage may well force a soon-rather-than-later thawing of the US economy without anything close to an optimal level of testing. Frequent testing of a good slice of the American public would be great, but right now we’re nowhere close. And it’s not just a logistics issue. It seems clear we need a better test than the current one where a long cotton swab is inserted deep into the nasal cavity.
But maybe American innovators will accomplish what government has so far failed to do. OneZero biotech reporter Emily Mullins writes how scientists in the private sector “are racing to develop new coronavirus tests that could be done much faster and with less equipment.” Some could be as simple as at-home pregnancy tests. (Government’s role would come in the form of fast FDA authorization, investment, and coordination to quickly get this better test to the public.) One example:
To make even faster and simpler tests for Covid-19, some scientists are turning to the gene-editing technique CRISPR. Two companies on opposite coasts, San Francisco-based Mammoth Biosciences and Sherlock Biosciences in Cambridge, Massachusetts, are harnessing CRISPR’s ability to find and cut a specific sequence of genetic material in a rapid, paper-based test.
Both companies’ tests use a protein to look for the presence of SARS-CoV-2’s genetic material in a patient sample. If there’s a match, the protein binds to the genetic sequence and gives off a signal that causes a paper strip to change color. The readout takes about 30 to 45 minutes using minimal lab equipment. And the materials to make the tests are incredibly cheap. They could be produced for less than a dollar per test, says James Broughton, research lead at Mammoth Biosciences.
And even if all these potential testing advances don’t come to fruition in a few months, the effort won’t be wasted. There will likely be additional waves of this coronavirus, not to mention future outbreaks of new pathogens. As I wrote yesterday, Vannevar Bush, the head of the government’s military research agency during World War II, would first evaluate research proposals by asking, “Will it help win a war — this war?” For this conflict, we probably need research help for both.
Published in Economics, Healthcare
I have always maintained that human ingenuity is the most important, and inexhaustible, natural resource. Have we reached peak creativity? Not even close…
Innovation
Once a country stops innovating, decline is inevitable
I’ve heard that Gilead is seeing success with remdesivir
What a great post. Thank you so much. It is amazing what people can do.
There’s a great book called The Fortune at the Bottom of Pyramid by the economist C. K. Prahalad. Although the microloans he invented and championed did not work out as well as he hoped, the theory remains a good one in that strength and genius and innovation are bottom-up phenomena. It’s really rather miraculous. :-)
Microloans are a great idea — we need more micro-loan providers!
Bill Walsh, genius coach of the 49ers, 1979-89, told his players never pay attention to the media. You are never as good as the media says and you are never as bad as the media says you are.
Similar situation with covid 19 projections: the greatest pandemic since 1918 did not materialize and will not materialize.
Economists say economic recovery will be slow and take quarters, not months or weeks.
I agree that turning the economy back ‘on’ is not like turning on a light switch. And while I agree things won’t go back to ‘normal’, we don’t know what the ‘new normal’ will be.
Some sectors will bounce back quickly. Other sectors will bounce back slowly. Other sectors may never bounce back.
I don’t know which sectors will bounce back quickly.
I do know we are close to hitting rock bottom and there is no place to go but up.
Whether it’s a V shape or U shape, who the heck knows.
I for one am ready to head to a restaurant or bar tomorrow – OK, even tonight. Instant bounce back there for me and a lot of others I suspect. I am also ready to board a plane and take a vacation – give me a week or two, depending on the location. I don’t have a crystal ball either, but I hope that most will be ready to move on, even if a bit cautiously.
Weather will be an inflection point. Forecast for Los Angeles next week will be 80 F.
Good luck keeping people inside once it is sunny hot and humid especially on the east coast, many old buildings especially in NYC do not have air conditoning.
In Hong Kong restaurants are still open but at 50% capacity, in other words, physical distancing, diners have to sit and eat further apart than normal.
The problem is solved. We need to do what the more intelligent societies in the world are doing: the moment someone calls or visits a clinic or hospital ER complaining that they think they have symptoms, give them the damn test. And if they are positive for COVID, the for Pete’s Sake, give the patient hydroxychloroquine.
This whole situation reminds me of th3e MTBE issue we faced in California. People were collapsing in the streets from the amount of formaldehyde and ether that the MTBE was emitting after being in the vehicles’ combustion cycles. So could people just say,
“This is a problem; let’s get rid of MTBE.”
No, because we were up against a Major Economic Entity, Big Oil, so we had to spend 2 years fighting and organizing and fighting some more to get something done, as the Big Oil Industry called all the shots. “We have done 900 tests or more that show MTBE is so safe we could let our kids brush their teeth with it,” one oil industry lobbyist told me.
So now, while those of us who read the foreign press understand that in no other country is there a reluctance to go with the chloroquine, & that people are offered it early on, & they recover, hence no need for intubation and ventilator, not in Switzerland, not in Belgium, not in France, not in Germany, not in Bahrain. There the public health people are n-o-t owned by Big Pharma. (And in other nations, news announcers are not pawns of Big Pharma’s advertising, so hydroxchloroquine is not dismissed due to one poorly done test off in Brazil – I bet in foreign nations, no one is even hearing about the Brazilian test of HCQ)
Yes let’s face it – this is all about the Big Pharma industry, currently the Number One industry, bigger than Oil, Bigger than the Military & Defense. Here in the USA, we’re all going to
1: Remain locked up until the ‘experts’ say “Okay little children, now you can all come out.”
2: Roll up your sleeves, as all of you are mandated to have a new COVID vaccine, which has been rushed into production, which will contain RFID chipping & nano bot technology. (The last 15 words of this statement will never be said out loud)
3: The mandates will include everyone – no exceptions for people like me who have already been injured by the disaster that the 1970’s swine flu shot turned out to be
4: Be grateful to Bill Gates, and Zuckerberg – who are so wonderful and such humanitarians! And remember, the protections that will come to our society through 24/7 surveillance are true protections, right little, children!
5: Be sure and report anyone who doesn’t seem grateful, especially if they whine about totalitarianism or if they try and point out that hydroxychloroquine was eliminated from the actual considered solutions as it costs only 5% of what the vax program will cost.
And only in this nation of The Big Lie would it need to be pointed out that to truly solve any problem, whether it is a big problem or a little one, truth is important above all. The statistics of this illness were never done correctly, and are not being done correctly now. (See image, brought to my attention by Mister Bitcoin) In a nation where the statistics were done correctly, due to the nation having adequate tests, and through a proper method of collecting data, and then a proper method of analyzing data, the officials in Germany concluded that COVID 19 has a 0.7 or 0.8% mortality rate. (And this is especially true since they used hydroxychloroquine to treat people, instead of letting them get so sick they needed to be intubated and put on ventilators.)
It sounds like it takes over 12 days for patients to be on the upswing with remdesivir. From the interviews I have seen with desperately ill people who had taken HCQ for COVID, their improvement was in a matter of a few days, not close to two weeks.
Why is it that remdesivir might not be the good fit for COVID it was hoped to be? This might be because although some researchers consider COVID 19 to be a “SARS 2” type illness, doctors working with patients are stating COVID is not like SARS at all, but more like the type of oxygen deprivation a person experiences when mountain climbing at high altitudes.
Here is one report:
https://www.statnews.com/2020/04/06/gilead-remdesivir-data-coming-soon/
“What are the possible outcomes?
“Handicapping the results of the severe Covid-19 study requires some deep-in-the-weeds modeling of biostatistics. Thankfully, Umer Raffat, a biotech analyst at Evercore ISI, has done the heavy lifting for his investor clients.
“If people who take the placebo show clinical improvement after 16 days, remdesivir would have to track at 13 days to demonstrate superiority with statistical significance, Raffat said. This would be described in what researchers call a “hazard ratio.” The magic number would be 1.2, meaning that patients do 20% better on remdesivir than placebo.
“There is already one red flag. The investigators running the severe Covid-19 study in China have already taken an interim look at the data, but they did not stop the study early. This suggests remdesivir isn’t working as well as hoped, and dampens optimism for an overall positive outcome, Raffat said.
“It’s also possible the trial will produce mixed results.”
Of course, I am so pessimistic that our nation’s hospital personnel, hospital administrators, and our major politicians are so overly enthralled to Big Pharma, that we probably won’t be given any drug for COVID unless it falls into the $ 400 per unit price of Bill Gates vaccine. (If hydroxycloroquine cost $ 1,500 per unit, instead of $ 20 per month, it would be mandated by now.)
It’s a good point about big Pharma. HCQ is generic – margins are thin for generics. My friend is the controller at Akorn. They have very low margins.