• Global COVID-19 Total Races Past 1 Million Mark

    After just four months, the global COVID-19 total topped the 1 million mark yesterday, with more countries on several continents reporting exponential growth, even in some African nations. Meanwhile, the world’s number of deaths from the virus passed 50,000, with more than half of them from Europe’s hot spots. The Johns Hopkins online tracker shows 1,002,159 cases and 51,485 deaths.

  • There Are Many COVID-19 Tests in the U.S. – How Are They Being Regulated?

    When it comes to COVID-19 testing in the United States, the situation is about as messy as it gets. The U.S. went from having no tests, or assays, available for COVID-19 diagnostics to having multiple different tests available in a span of just a few weeks. Today more than 230 test developers have alerted the Food and Drug Administration that they are requesting emergency authorization for their tests; 20 have been granted. And 110 laboratories around the country, including my own, are also using their own tests. Having this number of diagnostic tests available to detect a single virus in such a short time frame is unprecedented.

  • DOJ: Deliberately Spreading COVID-19 to Be Prosecuted as Domestic Terrorism

    As panic and fear spread with the COVID-19 pandemic, stupid, or malicious, acts may soon be considered criminal offenses and subject to terrorism laws. DOJ has circulated a memo to law enforcement and federal prosecutors saying that deliberate acts to spread the coronavirus could be prosecuted under federal terrorism laws given that the virus is a biological agent.

  • Russia Using COVID-19 Disinformation, Conspiracy Theories to “Subvert the West”: Repot

    Russian President Vladimir Putin and his administration are using the coronavirus crisis to spread conspiracy theories in a bid to “subvert the West” and create a new world order, a new report has charges. The report says that Russia was propagating disinformation and conspiracy theories via social media accounts, fake news outlets, state-controlled media, pseudo-scientists and Russians living in the West.

  • Social Media Can Help Track the Spread of Disease

    Disease surveillance means monitoring the spread of disease through populations in order to establish patterns and minimize harm caused by outbreaks. A recent study explored how to effectively and ethically include social media and broader Internet tracking as part of public health surveillance efforts.

  • Tracking the Spread of Disease on Social Media

    For many years, researchers have turned to the public logs of search engine terms to help them track the spread of disease. They can analyze the keywords and phrases that people use and when they become interested in a disease or have symptoms.

  • Tests of Potential Coronavirus Vaccine Spur Growth of Virus-Fighting Antibodies

    A potential vaccine for COVID-19 has been developed and tested successfully in mice, researchers reported Thursday. “We’d like to get this into patients as soon as possible,” said Andrea Gambotto, associate professor of surgery at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and co-author of a paper announcing the vaccine in the journal EBioMedicine.
    As far as reaching clinical trials, “we would like to think a month, give or take. Maybe two months. We just started the process,” said co-author Louis Falo, a professor and chairman of the Department of Dermatology at the University of Pittsburgh.
    Mark Johnson writes in USA Today that vaccines often take years to receive approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Yet on March 16, the first four healthy volunteers in Seattle received a different potential COVID-19 vaccine, made by a company called Moderna and administered in a small clinical trial at Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute.
    Though the vaccine being tested in Seattle uses a new, faster but untested technology, the one developed in Pittsburgh employs the same technique used in flu shots. The Pittsburgh vaccine uses lab-made viral protein to build a person’s immunity to the virus.

  • Don’t Believe the COVID-19 Models: That’s Not What They’re for.

    Since the onset of the coronavirus crisis, governments, analysts, and health organizations have released different statistical models addressing the disease – and its numerical manifestations: the number of people likely to be infected; hospitalized; treated in the ICUs; or die. Different models offer different numbers and different trajectories. Which one of them is right? Zeynep Tufecki writes that “The answer is both difficult and simple. Here’s the difficult part: There is no right answer. But here’s the simple part: Right answers are not what epidemiological models are for.” The most important function of epidemiological models is as a simulation, a way to see our potential futures ahead of time, and how that interacts with the choices we make today. Thus, epidemiological models do not give us certainty – they give us something much more important: “agency to identify and calibrate our actions with the goal of shaping our future.”

  • An Antibody Test for the Novel Coronavirus Will Soon Be Available

    When a new virus invades the human body, the immune system leaps into action. First to the scene are antibody molecules of a type called immunoglobulin m (IGM). These bind with proteins on a virus’s surface, disabling it and marking it for destruction by cells called macrophages. A few days later the system produces a second type of antibody, immunoglobulin g (IGG), to continue the fight. IGMs are short-lived. They stick around in the bloodstream for three or four weeks before disappearing. The Economist writes that IGGs, however, are the basis for a much longer-term form of immunity. This can last for many years, or even a lifetime.
    Kits that test for these two types of antibodies when they have been raised specifically by sars-cov-2 should soon become available.

  • “Dunkirk” Effort to Boost Coronavirus Testing Begins

    A “Dunkirk” effort from smaller labs to meet the massive demand for coronavirus tests is finally under way after ministers lost patience with efforts by public health officials.
    Francis Elliott and Rhys Blakely write in The Times that the head of the respected Francis Crick Institute urged the government to move away from the cumbersome “big boats” of testing — Public Health England (PHE) and the NHS — towards smaller organizations like his to increase the level of testing of frontline staff, which stood at just 2,000 yesterday.
    Sir Paul Nurse, director of the Crick, said: “Institutes like ours are coming together with a Dunkirk spirit — small boats that collectively can have a huge impact on the national endeavor.”
    He added: “The government has put some big boats, destroyers in place. That’s a bit more cumbersome to get working and we wish them all the luck to do that, but we little boats can contribute as well.”
    The Crick and 300 of its staff, Europe’s biggest biomedical research facility, volunteered help two weeks ago but have been kept waiting ever since.
    It was also reported that employees at the Animal and Plant Health Agency (APHA) believe that PHE failed to utilize its capacity to deliver 40,000 tests a week two months after it was first identified.

  • British American Tobacco Working on Plant-Based Coronavirus Vaccine

    British American Tobacco, the maker of brands including Lucky Strike, Dunhill, Rothmans and Benson & Hedges, has said it has a potential coronavirus vaccine in development using tobacco plants. Mark Sweney writes in the Guardian that BAT has turned the vast resources usually focused on creating products that pose health risks to millions of smokers worldwide to battling the global pandemic.
    BAT said its US biotech subsidiary, Kentucky BioProcessing (KBP), has moved to pre-clinical testing and that it will work on the vaccine on a not-for-profit basis.
    BAT said it had cloned a portion of the genetic sequence of the coronavirus and developed a potential antigen. The antigen was then inserted into tobacco plants for reproduction and, once the plants were harvested, the antigen was purified. It is now undergoing pre-clinical testing.

  • InflaRx Starts Dosing COVID-19 Patients in Europe

    German biopharmaceutical firm InflaRx has enrolled and dosed the first patient in a clinical study of IFX-1 in Covid-19 patients with severe pneumonia in the Netherlands.
    Clinical Trials Arena reports thatIFX-1 is a monoclonal anti-human complement factor C5a antibody designed to inhibit the biological activity of C5a. The drug is not believed to impact the formation of the membrane attack complex (C5b-9).
    According to preclinical data, IFX-1 showed ability to control the inflammatory response-related tissue and organ damage via a selective blockade of C5a in the adaptive, randomized, controlled trial.
    The drug was found to be well tolerated in around 300 clinical trial participants, according to the company.
    IFX-1 is currently in development to treat inflammatory conditions such as hidradenitis suppurativa, ANCA-associated vasculitis, and pyoderma gangraenosum.

  • A Corona Test that Can Be Done Over the Phone

    Voice analysis can achieve amazing results, such as accurately guessing the shape of a speaker’s face, accurately guessing whether the speaker has been drinking tea or coffee, or diagnosing a variety of different diseases. While new, this field has already drawn the interest of academics, Israeli startups, and companies around the world.

    Shem Ur, a professional inventor, writes in the Times of Israel that he has decided to develop an over-the-phone coronavirus phone test. He writes:

    Right now, we are working to create software that can detect the coronavirus infection using only a person’s voice. For this, we need voice data from as many people as possible. Please help us by completing our voice questionnaire at Corona Voice Detect.

    If you know anybody who has tested positive, please ask them to complete the questionnaire as well. Their voice data is especially necessary for creating a program that can identify infections. If you think your friends, relatives, or anyone else might want to do this, please share it with them. The ability to identify infections is key to managing the situation and every piece of data will help us do this more effectively.

  • Doctor Says “Knock-on-Effects” of Pandemic Chaos Could Be Deadlier than Virus

    The disruption being wrought on Israeli healthcare by the coronavirus crisis could kill more people than the disease itself, a leading doctor has claimed.
    The Times of Israel reports that the warning by Anthony Luder, director of the Pediatric Department at Ziv Medical Center in Safed, came as an influential think tank raised alarm bells that the “collateral” effect of the coronavirus crisis could lead to more deaths than the virus, and after a minister said he was worried about people taking their own lives.
    “We may have more suicides than deaths from coronavirus,” Defense Minister Naftali Bennett said on Tuesday, suggesting that the economic consequences will push some Israelis to kill themselves if the lockdown is kept in place for too long.
    Luder fears that a potentially lethal domino effect of the crisis will be felt in the very health system that is treating coronavirus patients. “It’s entirely plausible that more people will die of the knock-on effects than of coronavirus itself,” he told The Times of Israel.

  • Making Sense of Italy’s Staggering COVID-19 Death Toll

    More than 12,400 people have died with the coronavirus since the pandemic started gutting this country last month, making Italy’s mortality rate around 10.2 percent in comparison with 4.2 percent or less elsewhere, based on World Health Organization figures.
    What is the explanation for Italy’s staggering mortality rate? Barbie Latza Nadeau writes in the Daily Beast that there are two explanations:
    First, Italy’s more than 105,000 cases of coronavirus infection merely scratch the surface. The real figure, says Massimo Galli, who heads the infectious disease unit at Sacco Hospital in Milan,  is “much, much more,” and if the true number of infections were known the percentage death rate would be more in line with other countries.
    The second reason Italy’s mortality rate seems so high is the result of how Italians count their dead. Italy counts anyone who died with the coronavirus as a COVID-19 death. “Only 12 percent of death certificates have shown a direct causality from coronavirus,” a high official in the Italian health Ministry said last week, meaning their true cause of death was a result of their underlying condition and pneumonia caused by the virus simply sent them over the edge.