• Coronavirus Not an Epidemic in U.K., Say Oxford University Experts

    Coronavirus is not at epidemic levels in Britain, experts at Oxford University have said, with new figures showing that only a tiny proportion of the population is currently infected. Sarah Knapton writes in The Telegraph that the latest data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) suggests that just 0.24 per cent of adults – approximately 136,000 people – have the virus. Separate surveillance by the Royal College of GPs indicates it may be even less. Figures released last week showed just 0.037 per cent of people have the virus, although this is likely to be lower than the actual number because few people are visiting doctors with symptoms. An epidemic is declared if the surveillance rate exceeds 40 per 10,000, but the new figures suggest it is between 24 and three in 10,000.

  • Government’s Handling of COVID-19 Is a Very British Disaster

    British exceptionalism has brought an exceptional outcome, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard writes in The Telegraph. “We have both an eye-watering number of avoidable deaths and a staggering amount of avoidable economic damage. The purported trade-off between lives and jobs – always a false choice – has instead spared neither. It is the worst of both.” He is unsparing in his judgement. He notes that Greece, with far fewer resources than Britain and having to cope with both a deep austerity and waves of migrants, has had 14 deaths per million, while the U.K. has just hit 472 (as of 24 April: the number is much higher by now). Greece has had 151 deaths linked to coronavirus, while Britain’s coronavirus-related death toll is approaching 50,000. “Britain could have been in a low-death club with Greece, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, or Germany,” he writes. If Britain had a similar COVID-related mortality rate as Greece, “These deaths could have been held to at 1,000 or thereabouts, ideally by Korean methods, or failing that at least by sheer Greek determination. All the other deaths are in essence a policy failure.”

  • Take the Shutdown Skeptics Seriously

    Should states ease pandemic restrictions or extend lockdowns and shelter-in-place orders into the summer? That question confronts leaders across the United States. President Trump says that “we have to get our country open.” And many governors are moving quickly in that direction.Critics are dismayed. Citing forecasts that COVID-19 deaths could rise to 3,000 per day in June, they say that reopening without better defenses against infections is reckless. Conor Friedersdorf writes in The Atlantic that such denunciations cast the lockdown debate as a straightforward battle between a pro-human and a pro-economy camp. But the actual trade-offs are not straightforward. Set aside “flattening the curve,” which will continue to make sense. Are ongoing, onerous shutdowns warranted beyond what is necessary to avoid overwhelming ambulances, hospitals, and morgues? The answer depends in part on an unknown: how close the country is to containing the virus.

  • U.S. to Accuse China of Hacking COVID-19 Vaccine Research

    For months, U.S. officials have been warning about a spike in cyberattacks during the coronavirus pandemic, but they’ve stopped short of pointing fingers at any one country. Now, as the all-out global race for a coronavirus vaccine accelerates and hackers home in on related scientific research, U.S. officials are preparing to single out a long-standing cyber adversary: China.

  • Germany: Politicians Worry about Radicalization at Anti-Lockdown Protests

    German lawmakers from across the political spectrum on Monday warned that the growing wave of anti-lockdown protests could provide fertile ground for radicalization and recruitment for far-right extremist groups and anti-vaccine campaigns. Over the weekend, thousands of people gathered in cities across Germany to demand an end to restrictions put in place to slow the spread of the coronavirus pandemic.

  • The German Way; Antigen Tests; HCQ Disappointments; Promise of Anti-Inflammatory Drugs

    These seven developments and topics on the coronavirus front caught our eye last week:
    1. Germany shows the way. Germany, led by a low-key, competent, steady, truth-telling, self-effacing, and empathetic former scientist (Angela Merkel was a professor of physical chemistry before entering politics) was a leader in the West in taking on the coronavirus pandemic, and now it is leading the way in a measured, calibrated reopening of the economy and restarting of public life.
    2. Predicting the pandemic’s next phase. Two studies paint a picture of how the pandemic could play out. Both studies see a future – about 2-3 years — typified by waves, or peaks and valleys, with social distancing turned on and off based on the number of infection cases.
    3. Mysterious young-children syndrome. Three young children have died in New York of a mysterious syndrome with links to the coronavirus. Doctors s call it “pediatric multisystem inflammatory syndrome.”
    4. FDA approves antigen test. In a significant move which holds the promise of greatly expanded testing capacity in the United States, the Food and Drug Administration has approved the first antigen test which can rapidly detect whether a person has been infected by the coronavirus.
    5. Effectiveness of antiviral drugs cocktail. In a new study published in The Lancet, researchers in Hong Kong reported that patients with mild to moderate COVID-19 appear to improve more rapidly if they were treated with a cocktail of antiviral drugs, compared with a group receiving a mix containing fewer drugs.
    6. Hydroxychloroquine continues to disappoint. Another large clinical trial shows what all other previous clinical trials have so far demonstrated: hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin are yet to prove their effectiveness in treating COVID-19.
    7. Promising COVID-19 treatments. Scientists are looking at anti-inflammatory medicines as a potential ingredient in an effective combination therapy. One possible anti-inflammatory treatment is tocilizumab, sold by Roche as Actemra and currently prescribed people suffering from arthritis.

  • Israel Preparing to Conduct 100,000 Serological Tests

    Jerusalem is preparing to launch a coordinated, nationwide testing campaign to determine the population’s readiness for a possible second wave of COVID-19, the government’s top health official has announced. In an interview with The New York Times, Health Ministry director general Moshe Bar Siman-Tov said that 100,000 serological tests, obtained from firms in the United States and Italy for almost $40 million, were being prepared for use by health clinics across the country in the coming weeks.

  • Digital “Virus” Helps Researchers Map Potential Spread

    As governments around the world wrestle with questions about how and when to reopen their economies, they must rely on predictions or weeks-old data to make informed decisions. Cornell University says that a Cornell researcher is among a team of engineers, statisticians and computer and data scientists who have developed a potential solution: a digital “virus” that could piggyback on contact-tracing apps and spread from smartphone to smartphone in real time. This would allow policymakers to gauge the impact of various social distancing measures without waiting two weeks or longer to learn how coronavirus has actually spread, said Shane Henderson, professor of operations research and information engineering and a co-author of “Safe Blues: A Method for Estimation and Control in the Fight Against COVID-19.”

  • U.K. Government Has “Terrorized” Britons into Believing Coronavirus Will Kill Them, Says Adviser

    The Government’s coronavirus warnings have “effectively terrorised” Britons “into believing that this is a disease that is going to kill you” even though most those infected will not be hospitalized, one of its advisers has warned. Christopher Hope writes in The Telegraph that Professor Robert Dingwall also said that “Eighty per cent of the people who get this infection will never need to go near a hospital. The ones who do go to hospital because they are quite seriously ill, most of them will come out alive – even those who go into intensive care. We have completely lost sight of that in the obsession with deaths.”

  • Just 332 under-45s Have Died in U.K. from Corona. It's Madness to Keep Them from Work While Our Economy Burns

    Alex Brummer writes in the Daily Mail that as a financial writer, he has reported on Britain’s humiliating search for a bail-out from the International Monetary Fund in 1976, on the stock market crash of 1987, the U.K.’s ejection from the European Monetary System (precursor of the euro) in 1992 and the financial crisis of 2008-09. “I can honestly say we’ve never had it so bad,” he writes. We are not just condemning a generation of young people to long-term joblessness, we are also encumbering the country with levels of debt which it will take decades to pay off and could even linger into the 22nd century. (Remember, the debts incurred as a result of World War II were only finally paid off by Gordon Brown in 2006.) Each of their deaths is a tragedy. But the latest figures from the Office for National Statistics show that, up until April 24, only 332 people under the age of 45 have died from Covid-19 out of 27,356 deaths in total. No one wants to see a second or third peak to this crisis. But the truth is we are living on borrowed time and money. If Britain wants to have the resources to run the NHS, provide decent social care, get our schools and universities up and running, and maintain the defence and safety of the realm then the economy has to be resuscitated — and fast.And there could be no better vanguard to bring us back from the economic precipice than a workforce of the under-45s. 

  • Past Pandemics Show How Coronavirus Budgets Can Drive Faster Economic Recovery

    There have been crises before the coronavirus crisis, but what is different is the scale of the current crisis. Ilan Noy writes that Economies everywhere are in freefall and unemployment is rising. Gross domestic product figures for the first quarter of 2020 show economic declines not seen since WWII. The challenge for governments is to manage both expectations and spending to drive recovery.

  • “Planetary Quarantine”: Risks of Alien Contamination

    In Michael Crichton’s 1969 novel The Andromeda Strain, a deadly alien microbe hitches a ride to Earth aboard a downed military satellite and scientists must race to contain it. While fictional, the plot explores a very real and longstanding concern shared by NASA and world governments: that spacefaring humans, or our robotic emissaries, may unwittingly contaminate Earth with extraterrestrial life or else biologically pollute other planets we visit.

  • Maybe Coronavirus's Aggressiveness Could Be Changed by Adding or Subtracting Sugar Molecules from Its Spike Protein

    Scientists have been tracking changes to the genetic makeup of the new coronavirus to better understand how best to slow its spread. Adam M. Brufsky writes in The Conversation that hisresearch on the link between high blood sugar in patients and severity of illness from the virus could provide insight into the nature of different possible types of virus. Specifically, the presence of sugar on the virus’s spike protein could help differentiate them. My hypothesis is that the severity of novel coronavirus disease could, in part, be explained by adding of sugar molecules to the coat of the virus and its receptor.It turns out that among other things, hydroxychloroquine can serve as an oral hypoglycemic agent, lowering blood sugar.

  • Wobbly” Tracing App “Failed” Clinical Safety and Cybersecurity Tests

    The government’s coronavirus contact tracing app has so far failed the tests needed to be included in the NHS app library, HSJ understands. Jasmine Rapson writes in HJS that the app is being trialed on the Isle of Wight this week, ahead of a national rollout later this month. Senior NHS sources told HSJ it had thus far failed all of the tests required for inclusion in the app library, including cyber security, performance and clinical safety. There are also concerns at high levels about how users’ privacy will be protected once they log that they have coronavirus symptoms, and become “traceable,” and how this information will be used. Senior figures told HSJ that it had been hard to assess the app because the government was “going about it in a kind of a ham-fisted way. They haven’t got clear versions, so it’s been impossible to get fixed code base from them for NHS Digital to test. They keep changing it all over the place.” HSJ’s source described the app as “a bit wobbly.”

  • Obesity Is Blamed for Johnson’s Coronavirus Suffering

    Boris Johnson was so badly affected by coronavirus because he is “significantly” overweight, a doctor said yesterday. The Times reports that Aseem Malhotra, a cardiologist, said that risk of death from the disease increased ten-fold if the patient is obese. He pointed out that “slimmer” members of the cabinet, such as Matt Hancock, recovered much more quickly and were not hospitalized. The prime minister, 55, has long struggled with his weight and in 2018 he revealed he weighed almost 16 and a half stone, which at 5ft 9in puts him in the high-risk category. Dr. Malhotra, speaking on Good Morning Britain on ITV, said the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention had discovered that there was an alarming link between death rates for COVID-19 and obesity.