(2022-11-17) Zvi M Covid111722 Slow Recovery

Zvi Mowshowitz: Covid-19 11/17/22: Slow Recovery. While the news has been fast and furious on many fronts, Covid is not one of them.

Except that, this week, I got it.

Executive Summary
I have Covid. It is no fun, but I should be fine.
Remarkably little broader Covid news.
Beijing seeing a spike in cases.

The Numbers

Physical World Modeling

Other Medical and Research News

Open-plan offices lead to 62% more sick days than individual offices, six person rooms lead to 30% less sick days than open plans

Some anecdotes about clinical trials and how impossible we have made doing them at any reasonable cost, with typical prices at hundreds of thousands of dollars per patient

I will quote the closing thoughts: Why is this industry so cursed? Some hypotheses:...

The FDA gets mentioned there at the end as the reason why you need to hire pharma execs, but what struck me most about the whole thing was the lack of regulatory barriers. All of this inefficiency and terribleness mostly seems like… unforced errors. You could choose to not do these things, if you had a corporate culture that wasn’t completely f**ed already.*

Thus, if you were to start a new company to do clinical trials at a fraction of the cost, this is something that could totally work without having to cut any corners whatsoever, except that you’d need to solve the problem of hiring the pharma execs without having them poison the culture. Which means you want their specialized knowledge without also having to give them other influence or power. Can it be done? I don’t know. I’d love to see people try.