Will Remdesivir help?

View in browser|nytimes.com April 29, 2020

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The New York Times

By Patrick J. Lyons

U.S. economic output shrank at a 4.8 percent annual rate in the first quarter, the biggest contraction since the 2008 financial crisis. Conservative groups fighting coronavirus restrictions have gotten signs of support from the Justice Department. France’s leading soccer league became the first of Europe’s big five to call off its season. Get the latest updates here, plus maps, a tracker for U.S. metro areas and full coverage.

The drug everyone is talking about

A federal trial suggests it might help people recover from the coronavirus a lot faster. But a study found it had no benefit for severely ill patients. The F.D.A. is likely to authorize its emergency use, an administration official told The New York Times.

All that news came on Wednesday about an experimental antiviral drug called remdesivir (pronounced rem-DESS-ih-veer).

Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, is optimistic about the drug, which was originally developed in the hope that it might be useful against the Ebola virus (it wasn’t).

In the federal trial, conducted by his organization, Dr. Fauci said remdesivir appeared to speed up recovery from Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, by about 31 percent compared with a placebo. While that “doesn’t seem like a knockout,” he said, “what it has proven is that a drug can block this virus.”

But the other study, conducted in China and published in The Lancet, threw some cold water on the buzz. Though apparently safe and well tolerated, the drug wasn’t found to give patients who were already critically ill any significant benefit. That study leaves open the possibility that remdesivir may be of some help earlier in the course of the disease or in less severe cases.

The drug’s maker, Gilead Sciences, treaded carefully on Wednesday, saying that it was “aware of positive data emerging” from the federal study. Trading in its stock was halted.

Caveats. Remdesivir has never been approved as a treatment for any disease. The science about it remains uncertain. The federal study and the data it yielded have not yet been peer-reviewed — which has prompted some questions about whether the results were announced prematurely, perhaps for political reasons.

Hopes have been raised before about drugs that seemed promising but later turned out to be ineffective — or in the case of hydroxychloroquine, downright harmful. There is still no approved treatment for Covid-19.

A frantic search. Another experimental treatment for severely ill coronavirus patients is to give them blood plasma from recovered patients whose antibodies might help the recipients. But there is nowhere near enough “convalescent plasma” to go around.

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A push to keep meat in the stores

Concerns have been building about shortages of meat, because so many packing plants in the U.S. have become virus hot spots, causing some to close.

President Trump declared the processing plants “critical infrastructure” on Tuesday, in a bid to keep the nation’s food retailers stocked with chicken, beef, pork and other products.

The executive order does not directly force plants to stay open, but it may allow the Agriculture Department to force meat companies to fulfill orders from retailers, and they would have to keep their operations running to some degree to do that.

Labor unions and advocates have pushed back, saying that too little is being done to protect employees, who often work shoulder to shoulder on production lines — one of the reasons the plants are hot spots in the first place. Federal agencies recently issued safety guidelines for protecting processing workers, but compliance is voluntary and, some in the industry say, all but impossible.

So far, at least 20 meat plant workers have died of the virus, according to one union, and thousands more have been sickened.

With several large plants closed, slaughtering capacity is down significantly, leaving some farmers to kill livestock they can no longer sell for processing.

Scandal in Iran: With chicken sales plunging, Iranian poultry factories killed 15 million chicks this month. Videos of a truck dumping the birds into a ditch where they were buried alive prompted an uproar.

Do quarantines make us night owls?

The pandemic has changed the rhythms of our lives in so many ways — including, it seems, our biorhythms.

New York City may be the city that never sleeps, but data on residential electricity use shows that when New Yorkers are stuck at home, they stay in bed a little longer.

On a normal weekday, power use in the city increases sharply from about 6 a.m. to 7:30 a.m., according to data from 400 apartments collected by Columbia University. But in these days without a commute or a rush to get children ready for school, the increase comes later in the morning.

Before stay-at-home orders went into effect, electricity use would fall sharply again around 9 a.m. as many people left their apartments for the day. But now, it keeps climbing throughout the day as people work and study from home, or cook more, clean more and watch more television.

The normal evening surge, when people returned home and flicked on the lights, is less abrupt now, too. And the data suggests that people are staying up later, with more total use at night and higher demand even as midnight approaches.

Over all, the data showed people using about 7 percent more electricity a day on weekdays, and 4 percent more on weekends, than before the pandemic.

Utility companies across the country say that residential customers are using more electricity during the day. But businesses ordinarily use much more power than residences do; because many businesses are closed now, overall demand for power is down — in some places by 10 percent or more.

Hot spots

In Singapore, the virus has spread rapidly through migrant worker dormitories, which are linked to a vast majority of the city-state’s 15,641 cases. One of the deadliest nursing home outbreaks in the U.S. is in a center for veterans in Massachusetts, where at least 68 residents have died. In New York City, which has had 170,154 cases and 17,627 deaths, Mayor Bill de Blasio criticized Hasidic residents of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, after police officers dispersed crowds taking part in a funeral for a rabbi who died of the virus.

What you can do

Try a tiny workout. Four seconds of high-intensity exertion, repeated periodically throughout the day, might counteract some of the unhealthy metabolic consequences of sitting for hours.

Find support for dealing with addiction. Though face-to-face counseling and in-person group meetings have been suspended, there are many virtual options newly available.

Bury the hatchet. Some people are using time in isolation to resolve deeply held grudges.

Pick up the phone. A young writer recommends rediscovering the old-fashioned phone call as a way to stay in touch with friends and build relationships.

What else we’re following

President Trump called for a crash program to expedite development of a coronavirus vaccine, with a goal of manufacturing enough to vaccinate the whole U.S. population by the end of the year — sooner than many experts say will be practical or safe. An unexpected effect of the pandemic: It’s disrupting the illegal trade in rare animals. The race is on to develop apps that could aid contract tracing, but there are concerns about privacy and hastily written software. A pug in North Carolina named Winston has tested positive for the coronavirus. It’s apparently the first known case in which the virus was detected in a dog in the United States. When the influenza pandemic struck in 1918, it complicated plans for women’s suffrage. Now, with the centennial of the 19th Amendment, the coronavirus is upending life once more.

What you’re doing

As we prepared to begin the quarantine, I started a baking group on Facebook. I’m a home cook and have a personal interest in learning how to bake, and now over 1,700 people have joined me in this group. Each week I post a series of baking challenges, and we learn new things. Most of us are baking for friends and family who we can’t spend time with right now.

— Abby Kumpel, Pittsburgh

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Lara Takenaga and Jonathan Wolfe helped write today’s newsletter.

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