That's really not what I was laughing at. It is the conspiratorial thinking...
It seems very likely that effective treatments for COVID-19 exist.
We have inadequate basis for that assertion. We can say that effective treatments for COVID-19
might exist and in any event very likely could be developed.
Anyway, we need precise definitions for 'effective' also. After all whatever treatments or preventive solutions may exist already or will be developed they will all be probabilistic.
There are cases in medicine in which a disease can be 100% eradicated every time. Those cases are mostly surgical ones. If, for example, a person has bladder cancer that has not spread, one can surgically remove the diseased organ, which will eradicate the disease. There will be consequences, but the cancer will be gone.
With viral diseases most 'cures' are probabilistic, just as vaccinations are inherently probabilistic.
Bacterial disease can be 'cured', usually with antibiotics. Not so with viral ones, simply because human technologies do not yet exist to make viral cures a sure thing. Even when sure things exist, they may well not remain a sure thing simply because organisms do seem to want to survive and they establish defense mechanisms to help them do that.
In medicine those issues are part of the reason why physicians, at their best, consider many factors as they consider optimal treatment. The best ones try to engage the patient in helping them do that. Most patients may not know how to efficiently help the physician.
Here on this thread it seems to me we should try hard to understand what a coronavirus is. We also should all understand why so little exhaustive efforts have been made to determine the best way to attack them. After all the most common coronavirus disease is the common cold, and there the treatment options are quite trivial because the disease itself is deal with pretty well by most human bodies.
Now we have something 'novel'. That means we do not know what to do about it. It also means we don't know how to treat it.
I don't mean to be obnoxious. I do mean to emphasize that this is science, so 'novel' by definition means we do not
know. Still the absence of knowledge does not mean the absence of opinion. As scientists, if we have only a little bit of evidence we can form an hypothesis. Just now there are hundreds of hypotheses floating around, a good many of them are being tested. That is all we have.
In the meantime thousands of excellent physicians are guessing, because not doing anything is not a choice. They must do whatever they think might help and hopefully not hurt. Then they report the results and we all promptly overreact to those reports.
Life is always thus.
