₦airaland Forum

Only 12,000 tested? Chai, we have finished. Coro cases in Nigeria is well over 10k.

Las las everybody go still get coro. Na to work on your immune system sure pass

COVID-19 patients on the antiviral remdesivir recovered about 30 percent faster than those on a placebo, the results of a major clinical trial showed Wednesday, as a top US scientist hailed the drug's "clear-cut" benefit.


Although not yet considered an outright cure, it represents the first time any medication has been shown to improve outcomes against the COVID-19 illness, which has claimed more than 200,000 lives globally and brought the world economy to a grinding halt.

A statement by the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) that oversaw the trial said that patients on the drug, made by Gilead Sciences, had a 31 percent faster time to recovery than those on a placebo.

"Specifically, the median time to recovery was 11 days for patients treated with remdesivir compared with 15 days for those who received placebo," it said.

Anthony Fauci, who leads the NIAID, told reporters at the White House: "The data shows that remdesivir has a clear-cut, significant, positive effect in diminishing the time to recovery."

He added: "Although a 31 percent improvement doesn't seem like a knockout 100 percent, it is a very important proof of concept because what it has proven is that a drug can block this virus."

The results also suggested that people who were on the drug were less likely to die, although the difference was quite small. The mortality rate was 8.0 percent for the group receiving remdesivir versus 11.6 percent for the placebo group.


The trial began on February 21 and involved 1,063 people across 68 locations in the US, Europe and Asia.

The first patient to be enrolled was an American who was repatriated after being quarantined on the Diamond Princess cruise ship and was treated at the University of Nebraska Medical Center.

Neither the patients nor their physicians were aware of which group they belonged to, in order to eliminate unconscious bias.

Peter Horby, an epidemiologist at the University of Oxford who was not involved in the study, said: "We need to see the full results, but if confirmed this would be a fantastic result and great news for the fight against COVID-19."

Scott Gottlieb, a former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), wrote on Twitter: "There's now enough data to support consideration of access under an emergency use authorization."

This would allow doctors to prescribe the drug outside of the context of clinical trials.


Blocks viral replication
Remdesivir, which previously failed in trials against Ebola, belongs to a class of drugs that act on the virus directly - as opposed to controlling the abnormal and often lethal autoimmune response it causes.

It mimics one of the four building blocks of RNA and DNA and gets absorbed into the virus's genome, short-circuiting its replication process.


In his remarks to the press, Fauci indicated that since this approach had yielded some success, it could pave the way for better drugs adopting the same model.

While the findings were broadly welcomed by scientists, some cautioned that the benefits were relatively modest.

"This is the first evidence that remdesivir has genuine benefits, but they are certainly not dramatic," said Stephen Evans, a medical statistics expert at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.

"These data are promising, and given that we have no proven treatments yet for COVID-19, it may well lead to fast-track approval of remdesivir for treatment of COVID-19," said Babak Javid, principal investigator of Tsinghua University School of Medicine in Beijing.

"However, it also shows that remdesivir is not a magic bullet in this context."

There had been mixed news about the intravenous antiviral in recent weeks.

A summary of results posted on the website of the World Health Organization last week showed it failed in a smaller Chinese trial. The Lancet on Wednesday published the formal paper describing that experiment.


In this study of 237 patients in Wuhan, China, doctors found no positive effects of administering the drug compared with a control group of adults, except for those patients who required ventilators.

But the Chinese test had to be halted early because it could not recruit enough people to meet its initial goals, and was considered by many experts to be too small to draw reliable conclusions from.

Fauci said it was "not an adequate study."

Apart from remdesivir, the antimalarial drugs hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine are also being widely used against COVID-19 on a so-called "compassionate basis" pending results from large trials.

Other therapies that are being studied include collecting antibodies from COVID-19 survivors and injecting them in patients, or harvesting antibodies from genetically-engineered mice that were deliberately infected.


Source:
https://www.sciencealert.com/a-new-antiviral-treatment-could-cut-covid-19-recovery-time-by-nearly-a-third

How did China succeed?

The United States Pentagon is a secretive place by nature, but every once in a while, the public gets a little peek behind closed doors.

After years of speculation, defence officials have now declassified and released three grainy videos from the Navy that have been circulating online for a while now, causing all sorts of speculation.


The mysterious footage was captured using infrared cameras in November 2004 and January 2015, and leaked to the public a few years ago.

To this day, even with a flurry of internet speculation, no one can say for sure what these videos actually depict. In one, a pilot can be heard saying, "What the f--k is that?" as a strange object whizzes over the ocean.


In another, a spindle-shaped thingamabob can be seen rotating.

"It's a f---ing drone, bro," the pilot says to his colleague.

"My gosh! They're all going against the wind," another comments.


As far as the Pentagon is concerned, these fast-flying mysterious objects are "unidentified aerial phenomena", more popularly known as UFOs.

Of course, as surely we shouldn't have to repeat by now, seeing a UFO doesn't point to the existence of alien vehicles operated by another life form. That's just a technical way of saying: we don't know what that was ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Last September, after fielding many, many questions from the public, the US Navy admitted these videos were real, although for some that still wasn't enough.


Now, after a thorough review, defence officials have decided to share the original videos after deeming that they held no classified information.

"DOD is releasing the videos in order to clear up any misconceptions by the public on whether or not the footage that has been circulating was real, or whether or not there is more to the videos," the US Department of Defence said in a statement.

"The aerial phenomena observed in the videos remain characterised as 'unidentified'."

But that characterisation is not for a lack of trying. For five years, from 2008 through 2011, the Pentagon had a top-secret program investigating UFOs and the potential threats they could pose to aircraft and other aerial activities.

The former head of this program actually resigned because of opposition to funding and government secrecy.

Since then, he's made it very clear he personally believes there's "compelling evidence" we may not be alone, joining the company To the Stars Academy of Arts and Sciences, which was co-founded by former Blink-182 musician Tom DeLonge and which first released these videos.

What a small, strange world we live in.

https://www.sciencealert.com/grainy-ufo-videos-from-the-us-navy-have-finally-been-declassified-by-the-pentagon


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2UpQvGo0sqc

Mmccchhhewwww

Good

DAvidoooo issssa big boyyy!!!

HMMMMMMM!

Nice one. They are getting civilized gradually

BOOZELEE:
The Lockdown should continue but they should let children go back to school since the disease hardly kill children.

The children would take it home and kill their patents

At this time of the day, look at the bezel. I can't buy it

Nigerians are so stupid. 800 plus confirmed cases and you're thinking you should know one person out of Nigeria's 200 million population.
By the time you start knowing people it would have gotten to 10 million cases.

Nice one

Nice

Aswear this is parasitism.
Nigeria should be a symbiotic union, not a parasitic union

When i tried to educate people on how serious this issue is, they told me be positive. Positivity does not work with corona virus.
The only thing that works is following the precautions.
The law of cause and effect cannot be set aside just because you're being positive.

Chai!