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posted by martyb on Tuesday July 28 2020, @08:18AM   Printer-friendly
from the speedy-recovery dept.

https://www.military.com/daily-news/2020/07/22/error-tricare-tells-600k-beneficiaries-theyve-had-covid-19.html:

More than 600,000 people in Tricare, a health care program of the United States Department of Defense Military Health System, received emails July 17 asking if they would donate blood for research as "survivors of COVID-19."

But just 31,000 people affiliated with the U.S. military have been officially diagnosed with the coronavirus, which prompted confusion, Military.com reported last week.

"Just wondering [if] anybody [got] an email from Tricare saying since you are a COVID survivor, please donate your plasma.?? I have NOT been tested," wrote a beneficiary on Facebook. "Just remember all those people inputting data are human and make mistakes."

The mass email went to every beneficiary located near a collection point.


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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by khallow on Tuesday July 28 2020, @12:20PM (31 children)

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday July 28 2020, @12:20PM (#1027572) Journal
    This is just standard bureaucracy combined with some idiotic decision makers at top.

    No better way to make that happen than unreliable tests, unreliable results, unreliable population statistics, inconsistent personal anecdotes...

    Where are the reliable tests, reliable results, etc going to come from?

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  • (Score: 2) by RS3 on Tuesday July 28 2020, @01:33PM (5 children)

    by RS3 (6367) on Tuesday July 28 2020, @01:33PM (#1027592)

    An old acquaintance who is a successful businessman and has to deal with various govt. agencies in his business, once made the comment "govt. employees are the dregs of society". Of course that was cynical, sweeping / too inclusive, but mostly right.

    If you learn and accept things like that being true and part of life, you have a better starting point when trying to effect change and improvement.

    • (Score: 3, Offtopic) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday July 28 2020, @01:43PM (2 children)

      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Tuesday July 28 2020, @01:43PM (#1027598)

      When dealing with the FDA, we were always much more impressed with (and more able to work productively with) the new guys than the career bureaucrats. The cynical truth was: anybody of any competence/value in the government leaves to make much more money in the private sector within a very short time, five years at most it seems.

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      • (Score: 2) by RS3 on Tuesday July 28 2020, @01:51PM (1 child)

        by RS3 (6367) on Tuesday July 28 2020, @01:51PM (#1027604)

        And I think it's generally true that anyone successful in the private sector doesn't want to get involved with government.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 28 2020, @02:50PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 28 2020, @02:50PM (#1027639)

          Every company (people) that takes government money would bed to differ. Even the lauded sacred cows of research, tech, and social justice

    • (Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 28 2020, @02:52PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 28 2020, @02:52PM (#1027640)

      Personally i havent seen any difference in the people that make up private enterprise and government employees. Perhaps your friend (and yourself) have a bias?

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 28 2020, @10:57PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 28 2020, @10:57PM (#1027822)

        Do they realize that Tricare is run by contractors?

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 28 2020, @01:44PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 28 2020, @01:44PM (#1027599)

    > Where are the reliable tests, reliable results, etc going to come from?

    More accurate question is: where do the reliable results go after they've been collected?

    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by HiThere on Tuesday July 28 2020, @02:49PM (1 child)

      by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday July 28 2020, @02:49PM (#1027637) Journal

      You are assuming, without evidence, that reliable results exist on an individual level. Every test I've looked into has a significant error rate. At an individual level, a 5% false positive level doesn't mean you've got a 5% chance that the test result is wrong, because the chance is also dependent on the percentage of actual positive cases at the population level. Similar comments apply to the false negatives.

      Even tests with a fairly high error rate can be useful at the population level, as long as you know the error rate. This is MUCH less true at the individual level.

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  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday July 28 2020, @01:49PM (1 child)

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Tuesday July 28 2020, @01:49PM (#1027601)

    Where are the reliable tests, reliable results, etc going to come from?

    You can start with following established procedures for development, qualification to use, etc. instead of rushing diagnostic tests into use bypassing controls that have been shown to improve test quality and overall patient outcomes.

    If you want to get really radical, you can also boost transparency - putting a blockchain style audit-trail on every result that ends up in the published statistics, along with lateral links that show all the data that was collected and discarded, allowing independent review of all the information and publication of all interested viewpoints with each having easy access to the entire dataset.

    For the contrasting approach, just review the news of the last 6 months, including things like: all data clears through the Whitehouse before release to the CDC for analysis, Florida firing their highest profile data scientist for "not following orders," etc.

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    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 28 2020, @02:55PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 28 2020, @02:55PM (#1027641)

      This is a national emergency. The whitehouse is the top of our elected government. Why wouldnt/shouldnt they have first access to the data?

  • (Score: 2) by RS3 on Tuesday July 28 2020, @01:49PM (18 children)

    by RS3 (6367) on Tuesday July 28 2020, @01:49PM (#1027602)

    Where are the reliable tests, reliable results, etc going to come from?

    Yes, I've wondered that from the start. Being big on actual useful information, from the start I've felt that the only way to deal with this disease is to test pretty much everyone.

    There are too many reports of unreliable tests. Maybe the tests work differently on different people? Some people can be infected yet test negative even with the best tests. And yet other people don't survive no matter the best efforts of doctors. I'm thinking along the lines of allergies: for instance some people have peanut allergies so bad they'll die due to airway inflammation with trace amounts of peanut in their mouths.

    There's so much we still don't know about viruses in general. The world is learning. It's possible that a new test is unreliable for reasons we don't know yet. Or maybe it's incompetence. Or a biotech company rushing something to market to capitalize on profit (which has kind of become the norm for most things).

    • (Score: 4, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday July 28 2020, @02:00PM (13 children)

      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Tuesday July 28 2020, @02:00PM (#1027609)

      There has been a popular (and somewhat true) sentiment for many years that the FDA needlessly holds back new / innovative products, devices, treatments, etc.

      The bigger / more accurate truth is: for every good thing the FDA delays on its way to use, there are ten (perhaps more) bad ones that they usually stop altogether, or at least get pulled back off the market relatively quickly after they are shown to be harmful. This can't even begin to measure the number of useless or harmful "medical" products that never even try to go to market due to the presence of the FDA.

      At the onset of COVID, the administration basically announced "FREE FOR ALL!!!" and encouraged every idiot with the inclination to make COVID related tests and other products with a promise of easy access to the markets. I can see how that seems like a good idea from the perspective of a casino owner, for the rest of us - just like the marks in the casino - it's mostly bad news.

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      • (Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 28 2020, @03:03PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 28 2020, @03:03PM (#1027645)

        When youre driven into some type of action by screaming idiots with microphones (the media) you dont always make the best decisions. So our government should ignore the media? I agree. Unfortunately, the media in this country dictates what many people believe, so to do so would be political suicide. This points out a major problem in our system. Our policy on things the media latches onto ends up being dictated by an ocean of retards, thus killing any chance at a logical and reasoned approach. Those who scream loudest are the most to blame imo.

      • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 28 2020, @03:08PM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 28 2020, @03:08PM (#1027650)

        And just as an analogy, how good would your code be if your boss was watching every line you wrote and yelling in your ear at the top of their lungs about each character? We elect people to run our shit and we dont give them the chance to do so because journalism is dead and its now a reality tv show. Has been for twenty years, and this is what we get. We are all doing it to ourselves because we cant deal with the power of the internet. Too many agendas. Its the ultimate commitee. And you know what they say about committees...

        • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday July 29 2020, @12:14AM

          by JoeMerchant (3937) on Wednesday July 29 2020, @12:14AM (#1027874)

          how good would your code be if your boss was watching every line you wrote and yelling in your ear at the top of their lungs about each character?

          That would be a bottom 1%ile manager, not the kind that I would want running the whole operation.

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      • (Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Tuesday July 28 2020, @10:53PM (9 children)

        by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday July 28 2020, @10:53PM (#1027819) Journal

        The bigger / more accurate truth is: for every good thing the FDA delays on its way to use, there are ten (perhaps more) bad ones that they usually stop altogether, or at least get pulled back off the market relatively quickly after they are shown to be harmful. This can't even begin to measure the number of useless or harmful "medical" products that never even try to go to market due to the presence of the FDA.

        I'd say an even bigger/more accurate truth is that one really good thing helps vastly more people than ten bad things harm. The FDA's emphasis on preventing harm rather than helping people harms everyone in the world. Same goes for every other regulatory agency with the same biases.

        • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday July 29 2020, @12:23AM (8 children)

          by JoeMerchant (3937) on Wednesday July 29 2020, @12:23AM (#1027886)

          I'd say an even bigger/more accurate truth is that one really good thing helps vastly more people than ten bad things harm.

          That might be true in a marketplace free from IP restrictions, where good things could spread virally and bad things would naturally die out.

          In the marketplace we have, that "good thing" of yours is only as good as the money propelling it into the marketplace - without financial backing, the best mousetraps sit on the shelves, unsold, because people are distracted by the ones that are shoved in front of their faces by the most convincing salesmen, regardless of quality.

          And, as for those ten bad things, a typical "bad thing" escape kills more than a few people, or seriously harms hundreds to thousands before it gets its chain yanked. If the FDA shut down altogether (or got defunded like the WHO), those numbers would ramp up by an order of magnitude per thing, and the number of bad things making it onto the market would likely ramp up by more than an order of magnitude within a few short years. Seeing as medical mistakes already cause ~9.5% of all deaths in the U.S. - how much higher do you think that number can go before all the "great things unfairly kept from the market" by 2016's FDA policy stances can't compete with all the people dying, or worse being seriously debilitated, from stupid shit like injecting bleach, or chloroquine, or other "stable genius" ideas from the myriad of great businessmen stymied by science out there?

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          • (Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday July 29 2020, @02:12AM

            by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday July 29 2020, @02:12AM (#1027944) Journal

            That might be true in a marketplace free from IP restrictions, where good things could spread virally and bad things would naturally die out.

            That kind of market only sells red herring.

          • (Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday July 29 2020, @12:25PM (6 children)

            by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday July 29 2020, @12:25PM (#1028079) Journal

            how much higher do you think that number can go before all the "great things unfairly kept from the market" by 2016's FDA policy stances can't compete with all the people dying, or worse being seriously debilitated, from stupid shit like injecting bleach, or chloroquine, or other "stable genius" ideas from the myriad of great businessmen stymied by science out there?

            Not much different from today. Sorry, I don't buy that the public is on the verge of medical suicide and only prevented from such by the regulatory powers of the FDA.

            • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday July 29 2020, @12:53PM (5 children)

              by JoeMerchant (3937) on Wednesday July 29 2020, @12:53PM (#1028085)

              I don't buy that the public is on the verge of medical suicide and only prevented from such by the regulatory powers of the FDA.

              You don't get out much, do you?

              The FDA is not a 1960s AT&T Bell Labs quality genius organization, but... they do follow a somewhat roughly scientifically guided set of operating procedures, and when they're not being jerked around by the politicians - in the past usually shutting things down: Kessler in the mid '90s shut down ALL new device approvals as a knee jerk reaction to the breast implant rupture fiasco which lasted for ~3 years - today Trump using COVID as an excuse to crack open the sluice for anything COVID related - so, roughly 90% of the time, they are fairly consistently moving the needle toward the good side - even if the majority of individuals you deal with are either themselves annoying bureaucratic morons, or they are managed by an annoying bureaucratic moron, the agency as a whole manages to do good works.

              Yes Virginia, without the FDA there would be (more) Americans drinking bleach to fight the common cold, both labeled as Clorox, and in bottles sold as: "Organic homeopathic gluten free bacterial remover, just like Grandma used to use." Plus thousands of other "little harms" that would add up to a significant increase in deaths preventable by idiot bureaucrats.

              Some members of the FDA actually deserve respect, like the one who came into our office on Miami Beach with his badge and gun out on his belt. He quickly apologized and put them away, explaining that he had just come from the Colombian grocery store across the street where they had accidentally been selling soda cans filled with concentrated cocaine - the smugglers screwed up and failed to skim the "loaded" cans after import. And, yes, drinking a Refajo made with one of these spiked sodas would be pretty much instantly fatal.

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              • (Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday July 30 2020, @11:27PM (4 children)

                by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Thursday July 30 2020, @11:27PM (#1028981) Journal

                The FDA is not a 1960s AT&T Bell Labs quality genius organization, but... they do follow a somewhat roughly scientifically guided set of operating procedures, and when they're not being jerked around by the politicians - in the past usually shutting things down: Kessler in the mid '90s shut down ALL new device approvals as a knee jerk reaction to the breast implant rupture fiasco which lasted for ~3 years - today Trump using COVID as an excuse to crack open the sluice for anything COVID related - so, roughly 90% of the time, they are fairly consistently moving the needle toward the good side - even if the majority of individuals you deal with are either themselves annoying bureaucratic morons, or they are managed by an annoying bureaucratic moron, the agency as a whole manages to do good works.

                In other words, the scientific principle of CYA. Sorry, but they get bad press for a few people dying in a medical trial. They don't get bad press for seven billion people dying prematurely because they helped slow down medical research.

                • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday July 30 2020, @11:44PM (3 children)

                  by JoeMerchant (3937) on Thursday July 30 2020, @11:44PM (#1029006)

                  because they helped slow down medical research

                  The credo is: safe and effective.

                  First, do no harm. Demonstrate that your drug, device, whatever is safe to use. In the event that it is not completely safe, then the burden is to demonstrate that the potential harm is outweighed by the expected benefits.

                  Effective: does the drug, device, whatever do what is claimed better than placebo? Placebo is a pretty high bar, just paying attention to someone's problem is often enough to fix it, but we really don't need more placebos on the market charging money for what could be accomplished with a decent bedside manner.

                  You think anything that is regulated "slowed down" by the FDA is actually going to reach and positively impact even 10% of the people on this planet? You must have been smoking with Elon.

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                  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Friday July 31 2020, @01:43PM (2 children)

                    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday July 31 2020, @01:43PM (#1029272) Journal

                    First, do no harm.

                    There we are. No one sees the harm of opportunity cost. Everyone sees the harm from a few people dying from a bad drug.

                    You think anything that is regulated "slowed down" by the FDA is actually going to reach and positively impact even 10% of the people on this planet?

                    Much closer to 100% than that. By the end of this century, I think most people no matter where they are in the world will be part of the developed world and have access to advanced medical technology. Thus, the amount of time the FDA obstructs medical progress by "doing no harm" means their lives in the future will be a little bit poorer and shorter lived.

                    • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday July 31 2020, @02:06PM (1 child)

                      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Friday July 31 2020, @02:06PM (#1029286)

                      No one sees the harm of opportunity cost.

                      In most cases, no one knows the value of opportunity. There's speculation, hope, guesses, estimates, but you don't really know the future.

                      I think most people no matter where they are in the world will be part of the developed world and have access to advanced medical technology.

                      Most of this "advanced medical technology" you are concerned with bringing to the broader masses is a bunch of over-complicated, over-priced, "value creation" that could and should be boiled down to the essence of what it does to improve patients health/quality of life, but instead is being developed to extract ever-more profit out of the sick. The "free market" is doing little or nothing to steer product development toward patient benefit.

                      Thus, the amount of time the FDA obstructs medical progress by "doing no harm" means their lives in the future will be a little bit poorer and shorter lived.

                      Go find Kurzweil and do some meditative yoga while you extrapolate simple concepts into utopian images of the future. Better hurry, he's going to miss the singularity by a wide margin, and so are you.

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                      • (Score: 1) by khallow on Friday July 31 2020, @11:06PM

                        by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday July 31 2020, @11:06PM (#1029517) Journal

                        In most cases, no one knows the value of opportunity. There's speculation, hope, guesses, estimates, but you don't really know the future.

                        Doesn't mean that opportunity costs should be ignored just because "no one knows". And you follow it up with

                        I think most people no matter where they are in the world will be part of the developed world and have access to advanced medical technology.

                        Most of this "advanced medical technology" you are concerned with bringing to the broader masses is a bunch of over-complicated, over-priced, "value creation" that could and should be boiled down to the essence of what it does to improve patients health/quality of life, but instead is being developed to extract ever-more profit out of the sick. The "free market" is doing little or nothing to steer product development toward patient benefit.

                        Why rhetorically invoke the "free market" when the FDA makes it very non-free? I'll note a second, more recent post from a different story where you non-sarcastically observe [soylentnews.org]:

                        We're not angels. If you want to identify the devil in the room, call it capitalism.

                        I have watched ideas that work, could have been saving lives for the past 20 years with basically trivial per-patient cost, be shelved because the reality of my industry is that it takes a lot of money to get anything properly launched and supported in the broad market and that money gets apportioned to the "best" ideas, meaning the ones that will return maximal ROI. So, for the past 20 years a virtual cure for bulimia has been ignored. Another for meconium aspiration with similarly dramatic (like 95+%) improvement in outcome, and potential application for things like alveolar collapse associated with COVID, similarly shelved.

                        The Devil is a little less than 80% evil, the angels of capitalism do sometimes direct resources where they do the most good for the most people - those shelved ideas aren't "taking up oxygen" from other ideas that ostensibly do more good for more people. Sucks when you're one of the people that would benefit from a shelved technology, but if your pet technology were taken out and developed the thinking goes that it would be taking away more benefit from other things than it provides itself.

                        In the big picture, 1 million premature deaths a couple of times every 100 years from an out of control pandemic, while scary when it happens, isn't as worthwhile to address as something more mundane but pervasive, like clean drinking water. Yes, we can do both, but reality is: we can't actually do all the things. Ideas are easy, development is work, marketing is risky.

                        In the big picture, 1 million premature deaths a few times a century or millennium from bad medical technology, while scary when it happens, isn't as worthwhile to address as the irreversible development of better medical technology. The FDA enables the non-free market in medical technology where obvious medical advances like your "virtual cure for bulimia" can be ignored in preference to "over-complicated, over-priced, 'value creation'". They're the gate keepers that keep out ideas with too low a ROI, the barrier to entry for new advances that would upset the status quo and make our lives better.

    • (Score: 2, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday July 28 2020, @02:20PM

      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Tuesday July 28 2020, @02:20PM (#1027615)

      I'm thinking along the lines of allergies: for instance some people have peanut allergies so bad they'll die due to airway inflammation with trace amounts of peanut in their mouths.

      That's definitely one possibility, I'm thinking more along the lines of: location of initial infection and immune response. If you're infected first in your alveoli and the infection manages to spread fairly far before the immune system reacts, then the immune system over-reacts and causes alveolar collapse - boom: dead in days. Meanwhile, an infection that starts in a nasal cavity - maybe an olfactory site, and gets its immune response started there - maybe you lose your sense of smell for a while, get some general body aches, but never even come close to needing a respirator.

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    • (Score: 4, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday July 28 2020, @02:22PM (2 children)

      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Tuesday July 28 2020, @02:22PM (#1027616)

      It's possible that a new test is unreliable for reasons we don't know yet. Or maybe it's incompetence.

      One constant in this world: incompetence in management can overwhelm the best efforts of the working people.

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      • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Tuesday July 28 2020, @02:56PM (1 child)

        by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday July 28 2020, @02:56PM (#1027642) Journal

        Well, PCR tests are known to be highly susceptible to problems from contamination. They're a lot like an overdriven amplifier.

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        • (Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday July 28 2020, @04:12PM

          by JoeMerchant (3937) on Tuesday July 28 2020, @04:12PM (#1027671)

          Too much detail... at the executive level: "so, the test is unreliable, prone to false positives and negatives?" "Yes." "Great, get it out there! Let's undermine confidence in so-called science so we can tell the people what to believe and then what to do without worrying about all this annoying science and evidence stuff."

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 28 2020, @04:52PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 28 2020, @04:52PM (#1027678)

    Where are the reliable tests, reliable results, etc going to come from?

    From the autopsy