I am re-activating my twitter and twitter is an unhappy place, perhaps unsurprisingly given COVID19. Organising my thoughts a little here:

For the people who want to do armchair between country comparisons (often angst and pain ridden), this outbreak has not finished and there is the business of holding decisions a country makes to account in real time and working out major vs minor failings post account

That's not to excuse any bad decision (there have been plenty across the world, and to be explicit, many in the UK) but having perspective on these decisions is key to really understand them and the decision making task has not ended yet.

In particular we've got a whole bunch of when/how to relax shutdown restrictions on us (some already taken by Austria and Denmark) with truly complex lives vs lives calculus (eg, missed cancer or heart disease diagnoses) as well as economic questions.

There is no way these are easy decisions even with perfect data and well calibrated models; in the situation with still many unknowns it's highly unlikely perfect decisions will be made; we need to encourage and expect adaptability, far less sticking to one decision

It's worth reminding ourselves that the developed countries that have a healthcare service to treat, test and track are going to have more exposure of numbers during the crisis, and countries with less depth will probably have even deeper tragedies.

On a more positive note, I am always more encouraged by the science side which is now mainly email and slack - twitter has stopped being a good source for science for me (sadly!)

Thankfully science is international by default - there is little sense of national boundaries and a tremendous common effort in understanding the virus and understanding the host response to the virus. Its a nicer place to be than twitter.

As I have said before, plenty to be positive about in the future despite the grim times. With the astonishing speed large, randomised clinical trials have been set up we will know whether any of the early repositioned drugs change the biology of the virus or response

There is a whole host more pre-existing drugs to try (with nice mini phase II like trials to sort out the possible ones to go big on) and I've seen completely new drug development move faster than I have ever seen.

It is almost certain we will understand host genetic variation in the context of this disease in the coming months (perhaps month) - this can point to the next best drugs to trial in repositioning.

It might be the case that specific genetics is also a big risk factor (MHC as ever being the most likely culprit). Somewhere in here is also understanding the differential male/female severity rate which looks so broad and consistent that it feels more directly biological

(rather than infectious contact behaviours and comorbidities; but this is speculation - we need solid data)

Finally, and the furthest away from my own personal expertise, there are a host of vaccine options - I am heartened to hear of progress and aggressive approaches to scaling this up.

So is "Team Human" going to beat "Team Virus" - almost certainly yes.