• Israel Launches New “Contactless” Roadside CPVID-19 Testing Booths Which Have Zero Contact between Nurse and Patient

    Israel has launched a network of new ‘contactless’ roadside covid-19 testing booths which have zero contact between nurse and patient. The Daily Mail reports that the country has offered to share the design, which is relatively cheap and easy to produce, with other countries as part of the fight against the coronavirus pandemic. The booths, produced by healthcare companies together with civilian and military partners, provide an entirely sealed, sterile environment for the medic, and can be quickly disinfected between patients. Tests are carried out using two rubber gloves which are attached to the outer wall with airtight seals. Results are processed in a matter of hours and reported directly via the patient’s electronic health record.

  • Abbott Launches COVID-19 Antibody Test

    Abbott has launched its third test for coronavirus (COVID-19) and will start shipping it in the U.S. The test is a serology test – also called an antibody test – which could be a critical next step in battling this virus. Abbott says its test helps to detect the IgG antibody to SARS-CoV-2. An antibody is a protein that the body produces in the late stages of infection and may remain for up to months and possibly years after a person has recovered. Detecting these IgG antibodies will help determine if a person was previously infected with the virus that causes COVID-19. The new antibody test is to be used on Abbott’s ARCHITECT i1000SR and i2000SR laboratory instruments, which can run up to 100-200 tests an hour.

  • Factors Associated with Hospitalization and Critical Illness among 4,103 Patients with COVID-19 Disease in New York City

    Little is known about factors associated with hospitalization and critical illness in COVID-19 positive patients. Christopher M. Petrilli et al. write in medRxiv that they conducted a cross-sectional analysis of all patients with laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 treated at a single academic health system in New York City between 1 March 2020 and 2 April 2020, with follow up through 7 April 2020. Primary outcomes were hospitalization and critical illness (intensive care, mechanical ventilation, hospice and/or death). The researchers’ conclusions: Age and comorbidities are powerful predictors of hospitalization; however, admission oxygen impairment and markers of inflammation are most strongly associated with critical illness.

  • Coronavirus: The Puzzle of Why the Risk of Death Is Greater for Men and for the Elderly

    For COVID-19, age and sex appear to be strong predictors of who lives and who dies. Jeremy Rossman writes in The Conversation that the fatality rate for the disease is estimated to be 0.66%, according to data from China. In other words, 0.66% of people who are formally diagnosed with COVID-19, die. But the rate varies dramatically for different age groups, ranging from 0.0016% for children under ten to 7.8% in people over 79. Similar rates are seen in New York city. One explanation is that the ability of the human immune system to fight off pathogens declines over time and is significantly reduced in those over 70. But it is also possible that the reason why more men and elderly people are dying from COVID-19 is more simple. We know that the risk of fatal COVID-19 disease is almost twice as great if the person has underlying health conditions. Most of these health conditions show increasing prevalence with age, such as hypertension, which increases in occurrence from 7.5% in those under 40 to over 63% in those over 60. This increasing rate of predisposing health conditions could directly increase the risk of severe COVID-19 disease.

  • After Repeated Failures, It’s Time to Permanently Dump Epidemic Models

    Since the AIDS epidemic, people have been pumping out such models with often incredible figures. For AIDS, the Public Health Service announced (without documenting) there would be 450,000 cases by the end of 1993, with 100,000 in that year alone. The media faithfully parroted it. There were 17,325 by the end of that year, with about 5,000 in 1993. SARS (2002-2003) was supposed to kill perhaps “millions,” based on analyses. It killed 744 before disappearing. CDC predicted 1.4 million would die from Ebola, but the final death toll was 8,000. Michael Fumento writes in Issues & Insights that Oxford University Neil Ferguson predicted 200 million bird flu deaths, and 50,000 BSE death – but the actual number of deaths were 440 and 200, respectively. In the current crisis, Ferguson is the author of the most alarming model, and the one most influential in the implementation of the draconian quarantines worldwide, projecting a maximum of 2.2 million American deaths and 550,000 United Kingdom deaths unless there were severe restrictions for 18 months or until a vaccine was developed. “Assuming it’s possible to model an epidemic at all,” Fumento writes, “any that the mainstream press relays will have been designed to promote panic.”

  • Study Examines How Hong Kong Managed First Wave of COVID-19 Without Resorting to Complete Lockdown

    Hong Kong appears to have averted a major COVID-19 outbreak up to March 31, 2020, by adopting far less drastic control measures than most other countries, with a combination of border entry restrictions, quarantine and isolation of cases and contacts, together with some degree of social distancing, according to a new observational study published in The Lancet Public Health journal. The study suggests testing and contact tracing and population behavioral changes — measures which have far less disruptive social and economic impact than total lockdown — can meaningfully control COVID-19. The public health measures implemented to suppress local transmission in Hong Kong are probably feasible in many locations worldwide, and could be rolled out in other countries with sufficient resources, researchers say. However, the researchers caution that because a variety of measures were used simultaneously, it is not possible to disentangle the individual effects of each one.

  • Two Months of COVID-19 Lockdown Will Cost France €120 Billion, Report Says

    France’s nearly two-month-long coronavirus lockdown is expected to cost the country some €120 billion in lost revenue while “forced savings” are estimated to reach €55 billion, the state-funded French Economic Observatory said on Monday. “During the lockdown, the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) was cut by 32 percent, corresponding to five points of GDP for the whole of 2020,” the state-funded French Economic Observatory (OFCE) wrote. The observatory went on to say that “almost 60 percent of the drop in national income was absorbed by public administrations” and 35 percent by businesses. France’s economic recovery depends on how much the French spend once lockdown is lifted, it said. France24 notes, however, that although the French are expected to have shored up €55 billion in so-called forced savings during the planned 17 March to 11 May lockdown period – meaning they will have spent less than they earned – they are not expected to spend these savings “completely or rapidly” once lockdown is lifted given the continuing uncertainties over Covid-19.

  • The Totalitarian Temptation Resisted

    In Hungary, Azerbaijan, Egypt, Russia, the Philippines, and other countries, strongman leaders are taking advantage of a distracted international community to reinforce authoritarian agendas. Josef Joffe writes that, in contrast, national emergencies in the West do not breed despots, nor the grasping security state. Joffe argues that those who predict that the coronavirus epidemic will facilitate an authoritarian takeover, ignore four critical points – all of which contribute to making Western democracies resilient in the face of challenges such as an epidemic and other crises.

  • Is China winning?

    This year started horribly for China, with a respiratory virus spread in Wuhan, and the Chinese government hiding the truth about it from the world. But the draconian measures taken by the government appears to have worked, and Wuhan is back to normal (to a new, post-COVI-19 normal, that is). The Economist writes that China’s Communist Party hails this as a triumph not only for Chinese science: the country’s vast and well-oiled propaganda machine explains that China brought its epidemic under control thanks to its strong one-party rule – and the fact tat some Western democracies – chief among them the United States – have botched their response to the epidemic shows that Western liberal democracy is an inferior system of government compared to China’s own. “Some, including nervous foreign-policy watchers in the West, have concluded that China will be the winner from the COVID-19 catastrophe. These observers warn that the pandemic will be remembered not only as a human disaster, but also as a geopolitical turning-point away from America,” the Economist writes.

  • Super-Charging Drug Development for COVID-19

    Researchers are ramping up production of a promising drug that has proven effective in obliterating SARS-CoV in cellular cultures. The team hopes that the drug might also be effective in the fight against SARS’s close genetic cousin, the novel coronavirus (COVID-19). Northwestern University says that the team, led by Northwestern University and ShanghaiTech University, has produced the promising molecule, called valinomycin, in a cell-free system. With this approach, they increased production yields more than 5,000 times in just a few rapid design cycles, achieving higher concentrations of the molecule than achieved previously in cells.The research was published online recently in the journal Metabolic Engineering and will appear in the July 2020 print issue. 

  • Model Quantifies the Impact of Quarantine Measures on COVID-19’s Spread

    Every day for the past few weeks, charts and graphs plotting the projected apex of Covid-19 infections have been splashed across newspapers and cable news. Many of these models have been built using data from studies on previous outbreaks like SARS or MERS. Now, a team of engineers at MIT has developed a model that uses data from the Covid-19 pandemic in conjunction with a neural network to determine the efficacy of quarantine measures and better predict the spread of the virus. Mary Beth Gallagher writes in MIT News that Most models used to predict the spread of a disease follow what is known as the SEIR model, which groups people into “susceptible,” “exposed,” “infected,” and “recovered.” Dandekar and Barbastathis enhanced the SEIR model by training a neural network to capture the number of infected individuals who are under quarantine, and therefore no longer spreading the infection to others. Raj Dandekar, a Ph.D. candidate studying civil and environmental engineering, and George Barbastathis, professor of mechanical engineering, enhanced the SEIR model by training a neural network to capture the number of infected individuals who are under quarantine, and therefore no longer spreading the infection to others.

  • As Part of U.S. COVID-19 Reopening Steps, Midwest Governors Form Coalition

    Yesterday President Donald Trump during his daily coronavirus task force briefing will announce the first plans for reopening the economy and transitioning from widespread stay-at-home efforts. Yesterday during the briefing the president said America had likely passed the peak of its infections, and physical distancing measures were working. Joining governors on the West and East Coasts, seven Midwestern governors yesterday announced a new coalition to open the Midwest economic region. In a letter from Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s office, she and the governors of Ohio, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Illinois, Indiana, and Kentucky announced the partnership.

  • Virology Lab Finds Drug Originally Meant for Ebola is Effective against a Key Enzyme of Coronavirus That Causes COVID-19

    Scientists at the University of Alberta have shown that the drug remdesivir is highly effective in stopping the replication mechanism of the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, according to new research published today in the Journal of Biological Chemistry. The paper, Folio reports, follows closely on research published by the same lab in late February that demonstrated how the drug worked against the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) virus, a related coronavirus. The paper demonstrates how remdesivir, developed in 2014 to fight the Ebola epidemic, works in detail. He likens the polymerase to the engine of the virus, responsible for synthesizing the virus’ genome.

  • COVID-19-Related Mortality By Age Groups in Europe: A Meta-Analysis

    To date, more than 1,000,000 confirmed cases and 65,000 deaths due to coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) have been reported globally. Early data have indicated that older patients are at higher risk of dying from COVID-19 than younger ones, but precise international estimates of the age-breakdown of COVID-19-related deaths are lacking. Jérémie F. Cohen et al. write in medRxiv that  they evaluated the distribution of COVID-19-related fatalities by age groups in Europe. They found that people under 40 years of age represent a small fraction of the total number of COVID-19-related deaths in Europe. “These results may help health authorities respond to public concerns and guide future physical distancing and mitigation strategies,” the researchers write.

  • What the Coronavirus Figures Really Show: Males Are Dying at Twice the Rate, COVID-19 Is Third Most Common Cause of Death, England's Death Rate Per Capita is 50% Higher Than Wales and 10% of Victims Have No Underlying Conditions

    The Daily Mail reports that: Death rates are twice as high in men compared to women, with 97.5 deaths among every 100,000 men against 46.5 for women; England’s death rate is 50 per cent higher than Wales’, with 68.5 deaths for every 100,000 people - compared to 44.5 in Wales; coronavirus was the third most common cause of death during March, behind only dementia (6,401) and heart disease (4,042); heart disease was the most common pre-existing condition among the victims, with 14 percent of victims having the condition; two deaths from COVID-19 were registered before March 5 - the date officials first announced a woman in her 70s had died in Berkshire; true death toll in Britain could be 77 per cent higher than the official count given by the Department of Health each day; the death rate in March was lower than the five-year average - despite the last week of March being the deadliest since 2005.