People are dying from coronavirus because we’re not fast enough at clinical research
When medical historians look back at the Covid-19 pandemic, they will reckon with how the United States, with its vast technological and scientific resources, stumbled so badly in the face of an emerging virus. They’ll wonder why the country responded so slowly, and why, in particular, it lacked adequate diagnostic tests for months after cases started to rise.
But they will also be baffled at something else: that it took so long to study new medicines to determine if they worked — even as the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, was killing 2,000 Americans a day.
Simply put, more people will die from Covid-19 because we cannot study drugs more quickly.
