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Comment by cheriot | Hacker News Reader

> enough to supply more than 140,000 patients

> the firm has set an “ambitious goal” of producing more than 500,000 treatment courses by October, and 1m by the end of the year

So no. Even if this is a cure, the pandemic gets worse before it gets better.

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Global infection rate has stabilized, it's not getting "worse" in that sense. At that rate, there won't be much more than another doubling.

If 80% of those infected do not need treatment at all, that amount of courses may well be sufficient, or close to it.

I'm still waiting to see what happens in Africa and South America.

There's no 5G there, so I guess nothing.

It's stabilized under the current shelter in place regime, which will almost certainly have to be lifted at least partially for economic-political reasons.

When that happens my guess is there will be new waves of illness.

The places that are growing are too early in the curve to move that needle. The developing world got it first because people travel more, but the virus has reached poor countries and they won't have as many options.

I think this makes the mistake of thinking there is such a thing as a global infection rate. There are instead a couple of hundred separate epidemics, each with its own R0 and trajectory.

It’s also dangerously wrong, but human nature, to look at the current state of epidemics and project their future state. Epidemics that have been suppressed rather than extinguished resemble unstable explosives. Just because they’re sitting there nicely today doesn’t mean they won’t explode 3 seconds from now.

There is a global average infection rate. Of course it's just an average, but is representative of the growth of global cases. Of course you can arbitrarily divide this down from hundreds of epidemics to thousands of outbreaks, but we're talking about the global supply of the drug.

> It’s also dangerously wrong, but human nature, to look at the current state of epidemics and project their future state.

I'm sorry, but in the real world you have to make predictions in order to make decisions. If you never make predictions you can always be right, but then you'll always be useless.

> Epidemics that have been suppressed rather than extinguished resemble unstable explosives. Just because they’re sitting there nicely today doesn’t mean they won’t explode 3 seconds from now.

An "explosion" in that sense will still take weeks to become critical, giving you time to react, assuming you have testing and tracing capacity.

> There is a global average infection rate. Of course it's just an average, but is representative of the growth of global cases

Flattening the curve in NYC and Lombardy does not change the trajectory of Brazil and every other developing country. Even India’s fast response is less likely to work than a rich country’s shelter in place. As long as there is exponential spread out there it will keep showing up wherever you call home.

> I'm sorry, but in the real world you have to make predictions in order to make decisions.

I'll overlook the implication that I don't live in the 'real world'. What the statement means is that just because you're fine today you can ease up, because you really don't like the shutdown. You're still standing in an explosives factory, and now propose to shoot off bottle rockets just because nothing bad has happened today.

In the real world, you look at conditions as they are. In this case, those conditions are that the virus is still epidemic and there are none of the preconditions necessary to contain it present in the US, at least, and also in most of Europe.

> assuming you have testing and tracing capacity

Where is it that you are describing, since you are 'in the real world'?

Here in the US there is no where that I am aware of that has sufficient testing and tracing capacity to deal with a 3-week old exponential outbreak.

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