• 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.

  • Was COVID-19 Created in a Lab? China Has Some Urgent Questions to Answer

    In an interview with  The Telegraph’s Allison Pearsonon Thursday, Sir Richard Dearlove, the former head of MI6, said it was likely that coronavirus was the result of a Chinese lab accidental release. Charles Moore writes in The Telegraph that Sir Richard’s interview chiefly concerned a new learned paper about the hunt for a COVID-19 vaccine, written by distinguished scientists, the vaccinologist, Birger Sorensen, and the immunologist, Angus Dalgleish, in the Quarterly Review of Biophysics Discovery.

  • Could the Coronavirus Be Weakening as It Spreads?

    Hospital leaders in Milan and Genoa, cities in two regions of northern Italy that have been hit hard by Covid-19, say that the coronavirus is losing potency, Markaham Hide writes in Medium. Reuters also published an article  on the topic.

  • Trump Administration Selects Five Coronavirus Vaccine Candidates as Finalists

    The Trump administration has selected five companies as the most likely candidates to produce a vaccine for the coronavirus, senior officials said, a critical step in the White House’s effort to deliver on its promise of being able to start widespread inoculation of Americans by the end of the year. Noah Weiland and David E. Sanger write in the New York Times that the five companies are Moderna, a Massachusetts-based biotechnology firm, which Dr. Fauci said he expected would enter into the final phase of clinical trials next month; the combination of Oxford University and AstraZeneca, on a similar schedule; and three large pharmaceutical companies: Johnson & Johnson, Merck and Pfizer. Each is taking a somewhat different approach.

  • Oxford Vaccine Team Chases Coronavirus to Brazil

    Oxford University’s potential Covid-19 vaccine will be tested in Brazil as scientists rush to find places with high enough rates of infection to determine whether their inoculations work. Rhys Blakely and Catherine Philp write in The Times that Astrazeneca, the drugmaker partnering with the university, said that finding communities with sufficient virus transmission to prove that a vaccine offered protection was now the toughest challenge in the race to develop a jab.

  • China Formulates Plan to Roll Out Vaccine before Clinical Trials Are Finished in Race against Trump

    China has five vaccines in phase II human trials – more than any other country, and it may deploy one or more of them as early as September to at-risk groups even if clinical trials have yet to be completed, Sophia Yan writes in The Telegraph. Success could buoy China’s coronavirus-ravaged economy, help Beijing deflect global anger over its cover-up of the pandemic – and it would also be a blow to Donald Trump’s “warp-speed” plans for a vaccine.

  • GCHQ Boss Warns Foreign States Are Trying to Steal Britain’s Attempts to Build COVID-19 Vaccine

    Jeremy Fleming, the Director of GCHQ, Britain’s cyberspy agency, confirmed GCHQ had seen attacks on the U.K.’s health infrastructure in recent weeks. Dominic Nicholls writes in The Telegraph that Fleming confirmed reports that foreign powers and criminals are targeting laboratories researching coronavirus vaccines.

  • Could Coronavirus Be Killed Off Without a Vaccine? History Suggests There's a Chance

    Already this century, devastating outbreaks of deadly cousins of today’s virus have twice been crushed without global immunization programs – the 2002-2003 SARS-COV-1 and the 2014-2015 Ebola. Harry de Quetteville asks in The Telegraph: as countries around the world begin to relax their lockdowns, will the third time be lucky too?