Let's be clear that Plaquenil (hydroxychloroquine) and zithromax are no magic antidote. Obviously you will read otherwise on the interwebs, but they have been using them in New York and currently have close to a 3 percent mortality rate (that is likely to swing higher, not lower over time). Beyond which, the idea that something is good for treatment does not equate to it being good for prevention. Somehow people drew a weird line there. If you take an antibiotic every day to prevent respiratory infections, odds are pretty good that you won't prevent any infections, but any infections you do get will be resistant to the antibiotic you are taking.
From what I can tell the Ivermectin is mostly an in vitro study, with a little bit of study using mice.
The FDA-approved Drug Ivermectin inhibits the replication of SARS-CoV-2 in vitro - ScienceDirect This isn't to say that it won't be helpful and obviously we are going to grasp onto any straws that could prevent even a single death, but this is certainly early to be talking about as a possible treatment. One news article comments that Ivermectin has effectiveness in vitro against HIV, dengue, and influenza. Which is to stay that in a petri dish it works great, but there isn't an HIV patient on the planet who is taking ivermectin to control his or her HIV.
Vaccines are a year away. I have no doubt that there will be a vaccine and that it will be a big help. But honestly, if and when the virus came back this coming winter, the second time through wouldn't be as bad. No longer would it be a brand new virus for the whole population and some would have at least partial immunity to it.
I suppose testing is part of the answer -- Abbot has just come out with a 15 minute test and that will help considerably with timely results. The trouble now is that the US alone has run 1.5 million tests in the last couple of weeks. It is hard to ramp up production to the levels needed to get that sort of test out there. But even with testing, pretty aggressive quarantine measures are going to be the big thing to get things under control. I have read that in Kentucky, they are now instituting ankle bracelets for people who won't abide by quarantine precautions after they have had known contact with COVID 19 patients. Maybe that is an answer, although I don't know if we have enough bracelets for all of those involved.
---------- Post added 04-04-20 at 06:06 AM ----------
Originally posted by photoptimist I was interested in this CF gene hypothesis. There was a group of scientists that did an analysis of the population of Brazil, a country where TB is still fairly endemic and compared areas with higher CF gene presence (with higher caucasian heritage) with those that did not have that. They did not find a difference in resistance to TB.
I know that there is always a feeling that a high prevalence of a genetic disease in a population must be due to some comparative advantage in fighting disease or something like that, but with regard to CF, we haven't found it yet. I do wonder if just high levels of intermarriage in small towns in Europe in the Middle Ages ended up producing weird genetic swings that we wouldn't see otherwise. (See presence of hemophilia in the royal families of Europe and some of the interesting genetic diseases found in Amish family groups).