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Welcome to week four of Washington DC's official lockdown. Though for many of us residents of the city it's been a lot longer that we've been confined to our homes for. For me and my family, we've now been here for about six weeks.
For the next few weeks and months I will be bringing you a weekly blog trying to answer some of the policy questions that we're all asking right now related to the coronavirus crisis. How deadly is this disease? When will the lockdowns end? What will life look like afterwards?
Right now, I'm thinking a lot about disinfectant. I'm speaking just hours after several major household goods companies were forced to issue warnings to their customers telling them not to drink or inject disinfectant. And that's because US President Donald Trump wondered aloud from his press conference podium last night whether doing so might actually constitute an effective treatment for coronavirus. By now, many of us will have seen the video doing the rounds of his medical adviser Dr Deborah Birx, apparently trying to hide her reaction to the president as he was speaking.
But actually, there's a more serious underlying issue here. I suspect that one of the reasons that the president was talking in this way was that it reflects a growing pessimism among many people about the potential treatments for coronavirus. Earlier this week the FT revealed that rendesivir, the drug being developed by the company Gilead, has not proven effective in its first round of clinical trials, and in fact caused serious side effects for some of the patients being treated.
Then this morning the US Food and Drugs Administration has warned doctors about prescribing hydroxychloroquine. That's the drug that the president has also talked glowingly about, particularly in conjunction with azithromycin, an antibiotic. The FDA said this morning that those drugs, when taken together, or in fact, just hydroxychloroquine on its own, could cause heart problems for some patients. All this tells us that we're still very much at the early stages of dealing with this new coronavirus.
We remain, I suspect, many months away from a treatment, and certainly more than a year away from a vaccine. What that tells me then is that when the lockdowns do start to end, as we're seeing in some parts of Europe, for example, and of course some parts of China, is that they will have to be ended very, very gradually indeed to make sure that the health systems worldwide don't get very quickly overwhelmed.
