• Potential Drug Treatment Starts U.K. Trials

    A drug that could help treat coronavirus is to be trialed on a small number of patients in England and Scotland.
    The studies, which have been fast-tracked by the government, will initially involve 15 NHS centers.
    The BBC reports that in the absence of a known treatment for the virus, a handful of experimental drugs are being tested globally.
    The drug, known as remdesivir, is manufactured by the pharmaceutical company Gilead.
    Two studies are to be carried out in the UK - one on patients with moderate symptoms, and one on those who are in a serious condition.
    Trials are already underway in China and the US, with the first results expected in the coming weeks.
    The UK trials will be based in England and Scotland and overseen by Dr. Andrew Ustianowski, a consultant in infectious diseases.

  • Because of Age, Third of U.S. Doctors Prone to Worse COVID-19

    Nearly one in three licensed doctors in the United States is older than 60 years, an age-group particularly vulnerable to adverse outcomes from COVID-19, according to a study published yesterday on the preprint server medRxiv. And New York and California, two hard-hit states, have the most older physicians.
    Mary Van Beusekom, writing in CIDRAP, quotes the study’s authors to say that “The physician workforce is not only at risk of losing time spent in clinical care due to these exposures, but at a personal risk from severe disease that requires hospitalization and is associated with high morbidity and mortality.” The authors noted that 80 percent of deaths in China were in people 60 and older and that, in the United States, nearly half of hospitalizations and intensive care admissions and up to 80 percent of deaths have been in that age-group.

  • Are COVID-19 Models a Sound Basis for Public Policy?

    The justification for stay-home orders, closing of “non-essential” businesses, and so on, as we have often been told, is “flattening the curve.” Sheltering in place won’t prevent the COVID-19 virus from working its way through the population, it will just do so more slowly, thus avoiding unnecessary deaths which would result from overwhelming hospitals, especially ICUs.
    The policies enacted by governments are based on statistical models, and John Hinderaker writes in Powerline that as usual with models, the math is relatively simple. It is the assumptions that are critical. Hinderaker notes, for example, that in the U.K., Imperial College scientist Neil Ferguson notoriously revised his U.K. fatality projection from 500,000 to fewer than 20,000, with most of those being people who would have died this year, anyway. Ferguson said this drastic reassessment was due to the draconian stay-home order promulgated by the British government.
    “I am not calling Ferguson a liar, but I would love to see the assumptions and calculations underlying his about-face,” Hinderaker writes. “Are there really numbers for Case A (500,000 fatalities) and Case B (fewer than 20,000) attributable to curve-flattening that 1) are plausible on their face, and 2) have substantial empirical support? Consider me skeptical.”
    Hinderaker notes that many of the models on which public policy is based do not address measures which may lead to a reduction in infection (for example, imposing travel limits out of New York City; the increasing use of face-masks), or the success of treatments (for example, HCQ).
    “Is curve flattening, via stay-home orders and business closures, really as valuable as certain modelers and many politicians allege?” Hinderaker is not so sure.

  • As Global COVID-19 Total Passes 850,000, Study Shows 1.4% Fatality Rate

    A steady surge of COVID-19 activity on many continents pushed the global pandemic total past 850,000 infections yesterday and sent the number of deaths over 41,000. In research developments, a team from the United Kingdom published a new case-fatality rate estimate of 1.4 percent, based on all available data on deaths in and outside of China, and another group found that illness rates in South Korea trended younger and more female compared with patterns seen in China’s outbreak.

  • COVID-19 Therapeutics Accelerator Awards $20 Million to Fund Clinical Trials

    The COVID-19 Therapeutics Accelerator, a global initiative launched in March by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Wellcome, and Mastercard, has announced three grants totaling $20 million in support of efforts to identify repurposed drugs and immunotherapies for COVID-19.

  • Coronavirus Measures May Have Already Averted Up to 120,000 Deaths Across Europe

    Strong social distancing measures to slow and suppress the spread of COVID-19 across Europe are estimated to have averted thousands of deaths. According to the research, up to 120,000 deaths may have already been averted in 11 countries, including the U.K., Italy and Spain. However, they add that the estimated proportion of people to have been infected with the virus may only be between 2 percent to 12 percent of the population (2.7 percent in the U.K.).

  • “Pandemic Drone” to Detect Coronavirus

    A “pandemic drone” to remotely monitor and detect people with infectious respiratory conditions is being developed. The drone will be fitted with a specialized sensor and computer vision system that can monitor temperature, heart and respiratory rates, as well as detect people sneezing and coughing in crowds, offices, airports, cruise ships, aged care homes and other places where groups of people may work or congregate.

  • “Pandemic Drones”: Useful for Enforcing Social Distancing, or for Creating a Police State?

    As COVID-19 restrictions tighten around the world, governments are harnessing the potential of drones. From delivering medical supplies, to helping keep people indoors – drones can do a lot in a pandemic. But these measures may be difficult to rollback once the pandemic passes. And safeguards will be needed to prevent unwanted surveillance in the future.

  • The U.S. Needs to Know What Went Wrong

    When America has recovered from the coronavirus crisis and people are back to work, Congress should consider a 9/11-style independent commission to examine why the United States was so unprepared for the pandemic.

  • Partisanship Is the Strongest Predictor of Coronavirus Response

    The U.S. is a land divided. Americans have sorted themselves into opposing factions, with different values, sources of authority, and shared understandings. David Roberts writes that in some ways, there is no longer any meaningful U.S.“public,” but rather two publics that want and believe different things. America is facing what Roberts calls an “epistemic crisis.” Epistemology is the branch of philosophy having to do with knowledge and how we come to know things. In the face of the coronavirus crisis — and future epidemics – “the epistemic gap could have devastating public health consequences,” he writes.

  • An Experimental Peptide Could Block COVID-19

    In hopes of developing a possible treatment for Covid-19, a team of MIT chemists has designed a drug candidate that they believe may block coronaviruses’ ability to enter human cells. The potential drug is a short protein fragment, or peptide, that mimics a protein found on the surface of human cells. Anne Trafton writes in MIT News that the researchers have shown that their new peptide can bind to the viral protein that coronaviruses use to enter human cells, potentially disarming it.
    The MIT team reported its initial findings in a preprint posted on bioRxiv, an online preprint server, on March 20. They have sent samples of the peptide to collaborators who plan to carry out tests in human cells.

  • Race against Time: The Complex Task of Developing a Vaccine against the New Coronavirus

    University of Munich virologist Gerd Sutter talks about the complex task of developing a vaccine against the new coronavirus – and the approach he has adopted, which is already being tested against the related coronavirus MERS. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), more than 40 projects are already underway with the aim of producing a vaccine against SARS-CoV-2. Sutter’s comments: “Yes, a lot of things are now happening. Among them are projects which, like ours, are inspired by the protective effects of the MERS vaccine, but other vector-based approaches are also being tried. Then there is a whole series of projects that involve the use of nucleic acids, such as those being pursued by Moderna or by CureVac in Tübingen. At this point, it’s important to make use of all available technologies. If you asked me a year ago, I would have said that we would be very pleased if it took less than 2 to 3 years to get from the discovery of a new virus to a Phase-I trial of a new vaccine. Now, we can probably reckon with a year or thereabouts.”

  • FDA Issues Emergency Authorization of Anti-Malaria Drug for Coronavirus Care

    The Food and Drug Administration on Sunday issued an emergency use authorization for hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine, decades-old malaria drugs championed by President Donald Trump for coronavirus treatment despite scant evidence. Dan Diamond writes in Politico that the agency allowed for the drugs to be “donated to the Strategic National Stockpile to be distributed and prescribed by doctors to hospitalized teen and adult patients with COVID-19, as appropriate, when a clinical trial is not available or feasible,” HHS said in a statement, announcing that Sandoz donated 30 million doses of hydroxychloroquine to the stockpile and Bayer donated 1 million doses of chloroquine.

  • In the Fight against Coronavirus, Antivirals Are as Important as a Vaccine

    While many scientists are working on developing a coronavirus vaccine, others are busy testing antiviral drugs. Lisa Sedger writes in The Conversation that vaccines are generally only effective when administered prior to infection, but antiviral agents are important because they can treat people who already have COVID-19.
    Sedgernotes that chloroquine, a well-known anti-malarial drug, has also gained attention. One study tested it together with a broad-spectrum antibiotic azithromycin. While some COVID-19 patients in this small study recovered, other patients died (despite chloroquine treatment), and some patients ceased treatment for a variety of reasons – including the severity of their symptoms.
    “Nevertheless, people are interested in how chloroquine and azithromycin might work for coronavirus. Chloroquine exhibits antiviral activity and is currently used to treat autoimmune diseases because it also has anti-inflammatory properties,” she writes. “Azithromycin is an antibiotic used to treat bacterial infections, but it, too, exhibits antiviral activity, including against rhinovirus that causes the common cold. Chloroquine might need to be given early after infection to be most effective against coronavirus.”

  • Coronavirus: Mercedes F1 to Make Breathing Aid

    University College London engineers worked with clinicians at UCLH and Mercedes Formula One to build the device, which delivers oxygen to the lungs without needing a ventilator. Continuous Positive Airway Pressure (CPAP) devices are already used in hospitals but are in short supply.
    Fergus Walsh writes for the BBC that China and Italy used the devices to help Covid-19 patients. Forty of the new devices have been delivered to ULCH and to three other London hospitals. If trials go well, up to 1,000 of the CPAP machines can be produced per day by Mercedes-AMG-HPP, beginning in a week’s time.
    The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) has already given its approval for their use.
    Meanwhile a consortium of U.K. industrial, technology and engineering businesses in the U.K. has come together to produce medical ventilators for the NHS. The “VentilatorChallengeUK” consortium includes Airbus, BAE Systems, Ford, Rolls-Royce and Siemens.