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States Are Making It Harder to Sue Nursing Homes over COVID-19, and that Immunity from Lawsuits Is a Bad Idea
The coronavirus has devastated nursing homes across the country, killing tens of thousands of vulnerable older Americans. Nursing homes did not cause the pandemic, but poor infection control, inadequate staffing and sluggish mitigation allowed the virus to spread. Tara Sklar and Nicolas Paul Terry write in The Conversation that rather than doing more to hold these facilities accountable, however, states increasingly are protecting them from lawsuits. That shift is happening quickly. At least 21 states have taken actions within the last four months to limit the liability of health care providers, with nine states expressly including nursing homes. The industry is calling for similar protection in other states, and at the federal level, nursing homes are connecting with other trade groups to push for expansive, national immunity from lawsuits. Essentially, these states are protecting nursing homes from aggrieved residents and their loved ones who may have suffered harm, injuries or death due to their actions – or inactions – during COVID-19.
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Could Pressure for COVID-19 Drugs Lead the FDA to Lower Its Standards?
Given the death, suffering, social disruption and economic devastation caused by COVID-19, there is an urgent need to quickly develop therapies to treat this disease and prevent the spread of the virus. But the Food and Drug Administration, charged with the task of evaluating and deciding whether to approve new drugs and other products, has a problem. Leigh Turner writes in The Conversation that the FDA’s standards appear to be dropping at a time when rigorous regulatory review and robust oversight are crucial. For example, on March 28, the FDA granted emergency use authorization (EUA) for chloroquine phosphate and hydroxychloroquine sulfate, despite the drugs having known safety concerns and negligible evidence of efficacy in treating COVID-19. As a specialist in bioethics and public health, I see troubling signs that suggest the FDA’s new program for expediting reviews of potential therapies for COVID-19 is not working as it should. Instead, its regulatory oversight has been weakened. In its place, I see signs of political interference, inappropriate pressure to authorize products for emergency use, and an overwhelming surge of clinical studies that challenges the FDA’s capacity to carefully scrutinize them before deciding whether they should proceed.
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Prof Karol Sikora: COVID-19 Death Toll May Be Less than Half of What Has Been Recorded
The Covid-19 death toll may be less than half of what has been recorded because many victims of the pandemic would have died soon anyway, one of Britain’s leading medics has said. Jack Hardy writes in The Telegraph that Professor Karol Sikora, a senior oncologist who has built a huge Twitter following for his positive takes on the virus crisis, said doctors were sometimes too eager to put Covid-19 on death certificates.
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Coronavirus: Five Reasons Why the U.K. Death Toll Is So High
At the start of the coronavirus pandemic, UK government advisers suggested that 20,000 UK deaths would be a good outcome. Today, the tally sits at more than 45,000. Jasmina Panovska-Griffiths writes in The Conversation that there is no doubt the UK has been hit hard by coronavirus, and has the second-largest number of deaths worldwide, trailing only the USA which has five times the population and 111,139 deaths. Where did the UK go wrong? And how will it prevent further deaths if a secondary pandemic wave occurs as it reopens? Modelling and epidemiology give us some clues.
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Congress Should Investigate the Trump Administration’s Coronavirus Response
Charlie Martel, who in 2008-2009 led the staff of a bipartisan Senate investigation of the federal government’s response to Hurricane Katrina, writes that “Today, as with Katrina, the nation is faced with a deeply flawed federal response to an ongoing crisis with catastrophic consequences on a historic scale.” He adds: “Having apparently discarded the careful pandemic planning it inherited, the Trump administration has no evident strategy guiding its response to the complex crises created by the coronavirus. Administration statements and decisions have been impulsive, contradictory and in some instances dangerous. Congressional oversight is necessary to review the federal response and correct it where necessary.”
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EU: China, Russia Waging Broad Pandemic Disinformation Campaign to Deepen Crisis
The European Union, in an unusually blunt language, has accused Russia and China of a running a broad, sustained, and “targeted” disinformation campaign inside the European Union, aiming to deepen and lengthen the coronavirus pandemic crisis and its negative medical, economic, and social effects. The EU has criticized Russia in the past for its sophisticated disinformation campaign aiming to weaken the West and undermine liberal democracies, but the direct criticism of China is a break from the EU recent approach, which saw it tiptoeing around China’s many transgressions.
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Scientists Aim Gene-Targeting Breakthrough against COVID-19
A team of scientists from Stanford University is working with researchers at the Molecular Foundry, a nanoscience user facility located at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), to develop a gene-targeting, antiviral agent against COVID-19, the Berkeley Labreports.
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New Identification of Genetic Basis of COVID-19 Susceptibility Will Aid Treatment and Prevention
The clinical presentation of COVID-19 varies from patient to patient and understanding individual genetic susceptibility to the disease is therefore vital to prognosis, prevention, and the development of new treatments. The European Society of Human Genetics reports that for the first time, Italian scientists have been able to identify the genetic and molecular basis of this susceptibility to infection as well as to the possibility of contracting a more severe form of the disease.
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Majority of First-Wave COVID-19 Clinical Trials Have Significant Design Shortcomings, Study Finds
Most of the registered clinical trials of potential treatments for COVID-19 underway as of late March were designed in ways that will greatly limit their value in understanding potential treatments, according to a study from researchers at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
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Biomedical Sciences Researchers Provide Methods to Inactivate and Safely Study SARS-CoV-2
Detailed methods on how to perform research on SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, including procedures that effectively inactivate the virus to enable safe study of infected cells have been identified by virologists in the Institute for Biomedical Sciences at Georgia State University.
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Heat and Humidity Battle Sunshine for Influence over the Spread of COVID-19
An international team of researchers led by McMaster University has found that while higher heat and humidity can slow the spread of COVID-19, longer hours of sunlight are associated with a higher incidence of the disease, in a sign that sunny days can tempt more people out even if this means a higher risk of infection.
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Two Cats Are First U.S. Pets to Be Sickened with COVID-19
The first documented cases of U.S. household cats infected with COVID-19 have emerged in New York state, a new government report shows. Health Day reports that two cats—one in Nassau County, the other in Orange County—appear to have contracted COVID-19 from the humans with whom they lived, a team of veterinarians reported online June 8 in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, a publication of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
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Asymptomatic Spread of Coronavirus is “Very Rare,” WHO Says
Coronavirus patients without symptoms aren’t driving the spread of the virus, World Health Organization officials said Monday, casting doubt on concerns by some researchers that the disease could be difficult to contain due to asymptomatic infections, CNBC reports.
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Satellite Images of Wuhan May Suggest Coronavirus Was Spreading as Early as August
Satellite images of hospital parking lots in Wuhan as well as internet search trends, show the coronavirus may have been spreading in China as early as last August, according to a new study from Harvard Medical School. Shelby Lin Erdman writes for CNN that the study, which has not yet been peer-viewed, found a significantly higher number of cars in parking lots at five Wuhan hospitals in the late summer and fall of 2019 compared to a year earlier; and an uptick in searches of keywords associated with an infectious disease on China’s Baidu search engine.
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How Many More Will Die from Fear of the Coronavirus?
More than 100,000 Americans have died from Covid-19. Beyond those deaths are other casualties of the pandemic — Americans seriously ill with other ailments who avoided care because they feared contracting the coronavirus at hospitals and clinics. Tomislav Mihaljevic and Gianrico Farrugia write in the New York Times that the toll from their deaths may be close to the toll from Covid-19.
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