-
Overnight Briefing & General Reality Check - Mar 20, 2020
March 20, 2020
Have an opinion? Add your comment below. -
More coronavirus stories... Gotta wonder why people who saw the news stories about passengers unable to get off cruise ships would go ahead and take a cruise anyway. And guess what? It's still happening. Even though they have no onboard reported cases of coronavirus, a pair of cruise ships are not being permitted to let passengers off to explore Hawaii.
Passengers aboard both the Holland America Line ship Maasdam and the Norwegian Cruise Line's Norwegian Jewel will have to suck it up and head to their next destination.
Hawaiian authorities did agree to allow the ships to dock, refuel and restock, however.
Here in the US and around the world, Reuters reports some researchers are studying whether some widely-available, low-cost generic drugs might be used to treat cases of coronavirus.
Tests in France giving patients a trial does of hydroxychloroquine reportedly showed that just a quarter of patients given the drug still had the coronavirus after a week, while 90-percent of the patients given a placebo still had it.
Other pharmaceutical companies are testing the drug remdesivir, which was originally developed to treat Ebola patients. The New England Journal of Medicine reported that the drug was successfully used on the first patient infected by coronavirus here in the US this month.
And a Chinese study of people in Wuhan who've contracted the virus says although anyone can get it, people with the A blood type had a significantly higher risk of getting the coronavirus than people in the non-A blood groups.
Other research shows a breakdown by sex... the NY Times reported that even though both men and women have been equally infected, there's a 2.8-percent death rate in males, and a 1.7-percent death rate in females.
As far as age differences, a study published this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association showed that of the initial 45-thousand cases in China, nearly 15 percent of people 80 and older who contracted the disease died.
- Patients in their 70s, just 8-percent died.
- Children aged 1-9, nobody died (and composed just 1-percent of all the infected).
- Children 10-19, nobody died either (and composed just 1-percent of all the infected as well)
Another problem for people who contract the virus seems to be smoking. In China, nearly 50-percent of the men smoke, while only about 2-percent of the women smoke. And that could account for better recovery rates for women. Here in the US, the smoking problem might also extend to those people who vape.
-
-