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Comment by arn | Hacker News Reader

while true, it is super early in this disease. I'd think outcomes would improve over time as there is more experience, and more medication testing happening right now

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In the WHO China report, they mentioned that improvements in the standard of care caused a big reduction on the death rate. But surprisingly there were no details about those improvements! Basically China already has a lot of experience treating this disease, but I did not see any details about what they learned. I still hope that maybe there is some communication directly between the medical professionals, but probably this is just wishful thinking.

According to Bruce Aylward, of Canada’s WHO, they [China] had standard treatment memos, that reached the 6th iteration (to his surprise), that each hospital was implementing the very next day, after it was received. [1]. At that point, the containment effort was only seven weeks old, so they were updating the guidelines frequently, and distributing it throughout the country.

I don’t know what it is, as I haven’t seen it myself, but they seemed to have the treatment process down to a science. Or at least, to the best of their abilities, given the fast moving situation.

Maybe they’re sharing these guidelines with Italy now, so perhaps doctors and nurses from Italy can shed some light on them.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-o0q1XMRKYM

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