Day 138: Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?

It's a sort of silly topic of the day, but the pandemic shortages have extended beyond PPE, toilet paper, hand sanitizer, yeast, and meat to the meta level: Reuters reports that the coronavirus has led to a shortage of American coinage. Between the slowdown in cash transactions and reduced production at the US Mint (both due to coronavirus), banks are running low on change.

Excitement about the cheap, generic steroid dexamethasone is finally dying down, perhaps because the real numbers are sinking in:

Dexamethasone reduced deaths by one-third in ventilated patients (rate ratio 0.65 [95% confidence interval 0.48 to 0.88]; p=0.0003) and by one fifth in other patients receiving oxygen only (0.80 [0.67 to 0.96]; p=0.0021). There was no benefit among those patients who did not require respiratory support (1.22 [0.86 to 1.75]; p=0.14).

Based on these results, 1 death would be prevented by treatment of around 8 ventilated patients or around 25 patients requiring oxygen alone.

It's somewhat depressing that this is the best showing for a drug after six months of pandemic, and that we only have it because some folks at Oxford decided to try out a steroid (among a bunch of other treatments), even though steroid use for ARDS was thought to be a fairly bad bet. But it's still better than nothing, and almost as cheap.

Massachusetts cases are up a quarter of a percent. Though some people are still holding their breath for protest repercussions, we seem to have escaped them. The statewide increase in cases for this week was only 1%, and the only major city with ongoing significant activity is Fall River, at 5% with 71 new cases for the week:

(Pop out.)