• Coronavirus: Five Reasons Why the U.K. Death Toll Is So High

    At the start of the coronavirus pandemic, UK government advisers suggested that 20,000 UK deaths would be a good outcome. Today, the tally sits at more than 45,000. Jasmina Panovska-Griffiths writes in The Conversation that there is no doubt the UK has been hit hard by coronavirus, and has the second-largest number of deaths worldwide, trailing only the USA which has five times the population and 111,139 deaths. Where did the UK go wrong? And how will it prevent further deaths if a secondary pandemic wave occurs as it reopens? Modelling and epidemiology give us some clues.

  • Congress Should Investigate the Trump Administration’s Coronavirus Response

    Charlie Martel, who in 2008-2009 led the staff of a bipartisan Senate investigation of the federal government’s response to Hurricane Katrina, writes that “Today, as with Katrina, the nation is faced with a deeply flawed federal response to an ongoing crisis with catastrophic consequences on a historic scale.” He adds: “Having apparently discarded the careful pandemic planning it inherited, the Trump administration has no evident strategy guiding its response to the complex crises created by the coronavirus. Administration statements and decisions have been impulsive, contradictory and in some instances dangerous. Congressional oversight is necessary to review the federal response and correct it where necessary.”

  • EU: China, Russia Waging Broad Pandemic Disinformation Campaign to Deepen Crisis

    The European Union, in an unusually blunt language, has accused Russia and China of a running a broad, sustained, and “targeted” disinformation campaign inside the European Union, aiming to deepen and lengthen the coronavirus pandemic crisis and its negative medical, economic, and social effects. The EU has criticized Russia in the past for its sophisticated disinformation campaign aiming to weaken the West and undermine liberal democracies, but the direct criticism of China is a break from the EU recent approach, which saw it tiptoeing around China’s many transgressions.   

  • Scientists Aim Gene-Targeting Breakthrough against COVID-19

    A team of scientists from Stanford University is working with researchers at the Molecular Foundry, a nanoscience user facility located at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), to develop a gene-targeting, antiviral agent against COVID-19, the Berkeley Labreports.

  • New Identification of Genetic Basis of COVID-19 Susceptibility Will Aid Treatment and Prevention

    The clinical presentation of COVID-19 varies from patient to patient and understanding individual genetic susceptibility to the disease is therefore vital to prognosis, prevention, and the development of new treatments. The European Society of Human Genetics reports that for the first time, Italian scientists have been able to identify the genetic and molecular basis of this susceptibility to infection as well as to the possibility of contracting a more severe form of the disease.

  • Majority of First-Wave COVID-19 Clinical Trials Have Significant Design Shortcomings, Study Finds

    Most of the registered clinical trials of potential treatments for COVID-19 underway as of late March were designed in ways that will greatly limit their value in understanding potential treatments, according to a study from researchers at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

  • Biomedical Sciences Researchers Provide Methods to Inactivate and Safely Study SARS-CoV-2

    Detailed methods on how to perform research on SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, including procedures that effectively inactivate the virus to enable safe study of infected cells have been identified by virologists in the Institute for Biomedical Sciences at Georgia State University.

  • Heat and Humidity Battle Sunshine for Influence over the Spread of COVID-19

    An international team of researchers led by McMaster University has found that while higher heat and humidity can slow the spread of COVID-19, longer hours of sunlight are associated with a higher incidence of the disease, in a sign that sunny days can tempt more people out even if this means a higher risk of infection.

  • Two Cats Are First U.S. Pets to Be Sickened with COVID-19

    The first documented cases of U.S. household cats infected with COVID-19 have emerged in New York state, a new government report shows. Health Day reports that two cats—one in Nassau County, the other in Orange County—appear to have contracted COVID-19 from the humans with whom they lived, a team of veterinarians reported online June 8 in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, a publication of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

  • Asymptomatic Spread of Coronavirus is “Very Rare,” WHO Says

    Coronavirus patients without symptoms aren’t driving the spread of the virus, World Health Organization officials said Monday, casting doubt on concerns by some researchers that the disease could be difficult to contain due to asymptomatic infections, CNBC reports.

  • Satellite Images of Wuhan May Suggest Coronavirus Was Spreading as Early as August

    Satellite images of hospital parking lots in Wuhan as well as internet search trends, show the coronavirus may have been spreading in China as early as last August, according to a new study from Harvard Medical School. Shelby Lin Erdman writes for CNN that the study, which has not yet been peer-viewed, found a significantly higher number of cars in parking lots at five Wuhan hospitals in the late summer and fall of 2019 compared to a year earlier; and an uptick in searches of keywords associated with an infectious disease on China’s Baidu search engine.

  • How Many More Will Die from Fear of the Coronavirus?

    More than 100,000 Americans have died from Covid-19. Beyond those deaths are other casualties of the pandemic — Americans seriously ill with other ailments who avoided care because they feared contracting the coronavirus at hospitals and clinics. Tomislav Mihaljevic and Gianrico Farrugia write in the New York Times that the toll from their deaths may be close to the toll from Covid-19.

  • Shutdowns Through Early April Prevented about 60 Million U.S. Coronavirus Infections, Study Says

    If large-scale shutdown policies — such as ordering people to stay home and closing schools — were not implemented after the coronavirus pandemic reached the United States, there would be roughly 60 million more coronavirus infections across the nation, a new modeling study suggests. Jacqueline Howard writes for CNNthat the study, published Monday in the scientific journal Nature, involved a modeling technique typically used for estimating economic growth to measure the effect of shutdown policies across six countries: China, South Korea, Italy, Iran, France and the United States. Overall, the study suggests that emergency Covid-19 policies prevented more than 500 million total coronavirus infections across all six countries.

  • It's Time to Rethink the Disrupted U.S. Food System from the Ground Up

    The COVID-19 pandemic and resulting economic shutdowns have severely disrupted and spotlighted weaknesses in the U.S. food system. Farmers, food distributors and government agencies are working to reconfigure supply chains so that food can get to where it’s needed. But there is a hidden, long-neglected dimension that should also be addressed as the nation rebuilds from the current crisis. As scholars who study different aspects of soil, nutrition and food systems, we’re concerned about a key vulnerability at the very foundation of the food system: soil.

  • “Prof. Lockdown” Neil Ferguson Admits Sweden Used Same Science as U.K.

    The scientist behind lockdown in the UK has admitted that Sweden has achieved roughly the same suppression of coronavirus without draconian restrictions. Henry Bodkin writes in The Telegraph that Neil Ferguson, who became known as “professor lockdown” after convincing Boris Johnson to radically curtail everyday freedoms, acknowledged that, despite relying on “quite similar science”, the Swedish authorities had “got a long way to the same effect” without a full lockdown.