• 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.

  • Essential U.S. Workers Often Lack Sick Leave and Health Care – Benefits Taken for Granted in Most Other Countries

    The COVID-19 crisis has demonstrated the degree to which we depend on the work of others. This is particularly true of essential workers like truck drivers, grocery store employees and hospital nurses who are ensuring the rest of us stay safe and are able to get the supplies, food and health care we need. Paul F. Clark writes in The Conversation that the pandemic has also drawn attention to the fact that these workers, like all Americans, do not receive many of the basic workplace benefits and protections – like paid sick leave and basic health care – that workers in almost every other developed country in the world receive as a matter of course. Once the pandemic ends, much of the American workforce will still be without basic benefits and protections taken for granted in virtually every other developed country.

  • Public Unaware of “Horrible” Economic Damage Waiting “Around the Corner,” Former Chancellor Warns

    The British public is unaware of the “horrible” economic damage that is “coming around the corner” due to the coronavirus outbreak, a former chancellor has said, warning that the government’s furlough scheme has lulled workers into a “false sense of security.” Harry Yorke writes in The Telegraph that amid growing expectations that some companies may not reopen before Christmas, Lord Lamont said on Tuesday that he feared some sectors of the economy “will disappear” after the lockdown has been lifted. Lord Lamont, who served as Chancellor to John Major between 1990 and 1993, added that people currently reliant on the job retention scheme “may not realize their jobs have disappeared or about to… or that their firm is in serious trouble.” His comments come after the current Chancellor, Rishi Sunak, acknowledged on Monday that the furlough scheme, which is covering 6.3 million workers at a cost of £8 billion, is not a “sustainable situation” in the long-term.

  • Sweden Escapes Economic Slump by Refusing to Impose Lockdown

    Sweden has reaped the benefits of keeping its economy out of lockdown after escaping the dramatic growth slumps suffered by European rivals. Russell Lynch writes in The Telegraph that the Scandinavian country has taken a far more relaxed approach to tackling the coronavirus than much of the West, keeping most schools, restaurants and businesses open and relying on a voluntary approach to social distancing. Official figures show the country’s economy shrank by just 0.3 percent in the first three months of 2020, a far smaller decline than most forecasters and its central bank expected. The Riksbank had penciled in a drop of between 0.8 percent and 1.8 percent. The smaller scale of the fall contrasts with record slumps seen elsewhere across the Eurozone over the quarter as governments imposed much more stringent measures. France’s economy tumbled 5.8 percent, Italy’s 4.7 percent and Spain’s by 5.2 percent, while the Eurozone’s output overall sank by 3.8 percent - the worst decline in its history. The figures are likely to be far worse in the second quarter as lockdowns grind on.

  • A Face-Recognition Tech that Works Even for Masked Faces

    In these corona days, face-recognition technologies — used for a variety of security purposes — are severely challenged by the fact that everyone’s wearing protective masks. The Israeli company Corsight says it has solved that problem with autonomous artificial intelligence.

  • Experts Warn COVID-19 Lockdowns Could Have Dire Impact on TB

    A new report from a tuberculosis (TB) research and advocacy group suggests the COVID-19 pandemic and resulting lockdowns could have a devastating impact on the global TB burden in the coming years. Chris Dall writes in CIDRAP News that according to a modeling analysis commissioned by the Stop TB Partnership, a lockdown that disrupts TB diagnosis, treatment, and prevention services for 2 months, followed by the 2 months it would take to get normal TB services back up and running, could result in a rapidly growing pool of undetected and untreated TB patients. Over the next 5 years, that could produce an additional 1.8 million TB cases and 342,000 deaths globally. Under a worst-case scenario of a 3-month lockdown and 10-month restoration period, global cases would rise by 6.8 million, with 1.4 million excess deaths, the analysis found. The World Health Organization (WHO) says that 2018 saw an estimated 10 million TB cases and 1.5 million TB deaths.

  • Bats Bat “Super Immunity” May Explain How Bats Carry Coronaviruses

    A University of Saskatchewan (USask) research team has uncovered how bats can carry the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) coronavirus without getting sick—research that could shed light on how coronaviruses make the jump to humans and other animals. University of Saskatchewan says that in research just published in Nature Scientific Reports, the team has demonstrated for the first time that cells from an insect-eating brown bat can be persistently infected with MERS coronavirus for months, due to important adaptations from both the bat and the virus working together.