• Monitoring COVID-19 from Hospital to Home: First Wearable Device Continuously Tracks Key Symptoms

    The more we learn about the novel coronavirus (COVID-19), the more unknowns seem to arise. These ever-emerging mysteries highlight the desperate need for more data to help researchers and physicians better understand — and treat — the extremely contagious and deadly disease. Northwestern University says that Researchers at Northwestern and Shirley Ryan AbilityLab in Chicago have developed a novel wearable device and are creating a set of data algorithms specifically tailored to catch early signs and symptoms associated with COVID-19 and to monitor patients as the illness progresses. 

  • COVID-19 Deaths Deemed Likely to Climb Even as States Reopen

    Over the weekend and through yesterday, dozens of states reopened parts of their economy, many with extensive social distancing measures in place. But new leaked documents from the White House show that the U.S. daily death toll from COVID-19 will likely climb throughout the month of May, reaching 3,000 deaths per day by 1 June. Yesterday the model from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington, which has been widely cited by the White House, revised the total number of projected U.S. deaths from 72,433 by Aug 1 to 134,000, according to CNN. The increased death toll is because of increased mobility in states still experiencing rising case counts.

  • Nobel Prize-Winning Scientist: The COVID-19 Epidemic Was Never Exponential

    Professor Michael Levitt is not an epidemiologist. He’s Professor of Structural Biology at the Stanford School of Medicine, and winner of the 2013 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for “the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems.” With a purely statistical perspective, he has been playing close attention to the Covid-19 pandemic since January. Freddie Sayers writes in Unherd that Levitt’s observation is a simple one: that in outbreak after outbreak of this disease, a similar mathematical pattern is observable regardless of government interventions. After around a two week exponential growth of cases (and, subsequently, deaths) some kind of break kicks in, and growth starts slowing down. The curve quickly becomes “sub-exponential.” This may seem like a technical distinction, but its implications are profound. The famous model from Imperial College — with a consistent R number of significantly above 1 and a consistent death rate – persuaded governments to take drastic action. But Professor Levitt’s point is that that hasn’t actually happened anywhere, even in countries that have been relatively lax in their responses.

  • All Disease Models Are “Wrong,” but Scientists Are Working to Fix That

    An international team of researchers has developed a new mathematical tool that could help scientists to deliver more accurate predictions of how diseases, including COVID-19, spread through towns and cities around the world. Rebecca Morrison, an assistant professor of computer science at CU Boulder, led the research. CU says that for years, she has run a repair shop of sorts for mathematical models—those strings of equations and assumptions that scientists use to better understand the world around them, from the trajectory of climate change to how chemicals burn up in an explosion.  As Morrison put it, “My work starts when models start to fail.”

  • Scientists Create Antibody That Defeats Coronavirus in Lab

    Scientists created a monoclonal antibody that can defeat the new coronavirus in the lab, an early but promising step in efforts to find treatments and curb the pandemic’s spread. Tim Loh writes in Bloomberg that the experimental antibody has neutralized the virus in cell cultures. While that’s early in the drug development process — before animal research and human trials — the antibody may help prevent or treat Covid-19 and related diseases in the future, either alone or in a drug combination, according to a study published Monday in the journal Nature Communications. More research is needed to see whether the findings are confirmed in a clinical setting and how precisely the antibody defeats the virus, Berend-Jan Bosch of Utrecht University in the Netherlands and colleagues wrote in the paper.

  • Boris Johnson Must End the Absurd, Dystopian and Tyrannical Lockdown

    Only on 3 May did the stay-at-home restrictions promulgated by the British government on 23 and 26 March, rules enforcing the most draconian restrictions in British history, come before the Commons for retrospective endorsement with just two hours debate and no division. Steve Baker writes in The Telegraph that “We have lived under house arrest for weeks by ministerial decree – a statutory instrument that parliament had no foresight of and no opportunity to scrutinize or approve before it changed life in this country as we know it. The situation is appalling.” He argues that governments do have to take decisive action to protect public health, “But this suspension of freedom comes with a cost too. Millions of people in our country have been plunged into idleness at public expense and unemployment, facing financial and psychological hardship on a scale never seen before.” He emphasizes: “These extraordinary measures require not only legal authority but democratic consent. There is a real possibility that they have had neither,” adding: “The world just changed but British values have not.”

  • U.K. Coronavirus Lockdown May Be Eased Using “Traffic Light” System, Say Government Scientists

    A “traffic light” system advising the public about the risks of different activities could be used to ease lockdown, the Government’s scientific advisors have said. Laura Donnelly writes in The Telegraph that the proposals, drawn up last month, suggest lockdown restrictions should be eased “very gradually” and warn against relaxing the rules for workers without allowing social activities to resume. The paper was drawn up by the scientific pandemic influenza group on behavior (SPI-B), and considered by the scientific advisory group for emergencies (Sage) at its 2 April meeting. It warns that the abrupt lifting of restrictions and any subsequent increase in infections could undermine public trust in health policy, and mean people are less likely to comply with future demands. The documents are among 17 papers submitted to Sage in recent weeks, for consideration by the scientists who advise Government. 

  • Recent Coronavirus Protest Rallies Draw Extremists and Non-Extremists Alike

    Starting with the 30 April 2020 protest in Lansing, Michigan, a wave of protests against coronavirus restrictions has swept across the country over the past week, with attendees calling for stay-at-home orders to be lifted and state economies to be reopened. While the earliest protests in March were largely organized by extremists, the latest rounds of rallies have been planned primarily by conservative activists, and have drawn extremists and non-extremists alike.

  • Changes in Snowmelt Threaten Farmers in Western U.S.

    Farmers in parts of the western United States who rely on snowmelt to help irrigate their crops will be among the hardest hit in the world by climate change, a new study reveals. The study pinpointed basins globally most at risk of not having enough water available at the right times for irrigation because of changes in snowmelt patterns. Two of those high-risk areas are the San Joaquin and Colorado river basins in the western United States.

  • Restless citizenry; clinical success and failure; holding China to account

    These four major developments on the coronavirus front in the past week caught our eye:

    1. Difficult reopening. More and more countries are moving to reopen their economies, schools, and other parts of society, and each offers a different mix of measures aiming to balance economic recovery, societal (new) normalcy, and health security, with an eye to avoiding a second wave of infections in the fall. They all share one thing: Their citizens are becoming restless.
    2. Clinical success. The FDA om Friday allowed emergency use of remdesivir, the first drug that appears to help some COVID-19 patients recover faster, a milestone in the global search for effective therapies against the coronavirus.
    3. Clinical failure. Hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin have been aggressively promoted by President Trump as possibly “the biggest game changer in the history of medicine.” But in the largest clinical trial yet of the two drugs, they failed to have any benefit for infected patients, while significantly increasing the risk of electrical changes to the heart and cardiac arrhythmias, which could lead to heart attacks, strokes, and death.
    4. The China syndrome. More and more countries are calling for an impartial and credible investigation of China’s conduct regarding the coronavirus between November 2019 and the end of February 2020.

  • U.S. Allows Use of Remdesivir, 1st Drug Shown to Help Virus Recovery

    U.S. regulators on Friday allowed emergency use of remdesivir, the first drug that appears to help some COVID-19 patients recover faster, a milestone in the global search for effective therapies against the coronavirus. Matthew Perrone and Marilynn Marchione write for AP that the Food and Drug Administration cleared Gilead Science’s intravenous drug for hospitalized patients with “severe disease,” such as those experiencing breathing problems requiring supplemental oxygen or ventilators. The FDA acted after preliminary results from a government-sponsored study showed that the drug, remdesivir, shortened the time to recovery by 31%, or about four days on average, for hospitalized COVID-19 patients. Those given the drug were able to leave the hospital in 11 days on average vs. 15 days for the comparison group. The drug may also help avert deaths, but that effect is not yet large enough for scientists to know for sure. The National Institutes of Health’s Dr. Anthony Fauci said Wednesday the drug would become a new standard of care for severely ill COVID-19 patients. Remdesivir, which blocks an enzyme the virus uses to copy its genetic material, has not been tested on people with milder illness. The FDA previously allowed narrow use of a malaria drug, hydroxychloroquine, for hospitalized patients who were unable to take part in ongoing studies of the medication. President Trump touted the drug as a “game changer” and repeatedly promoted it as a possible COVID-19 treatment, but no large high-quality studies have shown the drug works for that and it has significant safety concerns.

  • Timing of Immune Response to COVID-19 May Contribute to Disease Severity

    A new USC study suggests that temporarily suppressing the body’s immune system during the early stages of COVID-19 could help a patient avoid severe symptoms. That’s because the research, just published online in the Journal of Medical Virology, shows that an interaction between the body’s two main lines of defense may be causing the immune system to go into overdrive in some patients. USC notes that the body’s first line of defense, the innate immune response, starts right after an infection, like an infantry going after a foreign invader, killing the virus and any cells damaged by it. The second line of defense, the adaptive immune response, kicks in days later if any virus remains, employing what it has learned about the virus to mobilize a variety of special forces such as T cells and B cells. The researchers say that unlike the common flu, a fast-moving infection which attacks certain target cells on the surface of the upper respiratory system and kills almost all of the target cells within two to three days, the COVID-19 targets surface cells throughout the respiratory system including in the lungs, and it has an average incubation of six days and a much slower disease progression. This leads the adaptive immune response to kick in before the target cells are depleted, slowing down the infection and interfering with the innate immune response’s ability to kill off most of the virus quickly.

  • WHO Extends COVID-19 Emergency; Cases Soar in Brazil, Russia

    The World Health Organization (WHO) COVID-19 emergency committee met yesterday to review the latest pandemic developments, and the WHO’s director-general yesterday accepted the group’s recommendation that the event still warrants a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC) under the International Health Regulations. The global total rose to 3,329,740 cases yesterday in 187 countries, and at least 237,647 people have died from their infections.

  • Hydroxychloroquine for Treatment of COVID-19 Linked to Increased Risk of Cardiac Arrhythmias

    In a brief report published today in JAMA Cardiology, a team of pharmacists and clinicians at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) found evidence suggesting that patients who received hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19 were at increased risk of electrical changes to the heart and cardiac arrhythmias. The combination of hydroxychloroquine with azithromycin was linked to even greater changes compared to hydroxychloroquine alone. Hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin each can cause an electrical disturbance in the heart known as a QTc prolongation, indicated by a longer space between specific peaks on an electrocardiogram. QTc prolongation denotes that the heart muscle is taking milliseconds longer than normal to recharge between beats. The researchers note that the delay can cause cardiac arrhythmias, which in turn increases the likelihood of cardiac arrest, stroke, or death. “While hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin are generally well-tolerated medications, increased usage in the context of COVID-19 will likely increase the frequency of adverse drug events (ADEs),” said co-first author Nicholas J. Mercuro, PharmD, a pharmacy specialist in infectious diseases at BIDMC. Senior author Howard S. Gold, MD, an infectious disease specialist at BIDMC and an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, said: “Based on our current knowledge, hydroxychloroquine for the treatment of COVID-19 should probably be limited to clinical trials.”

  • Epidemic Dictates an Open Exchange of Modeling Knowledge

    It has become increasingly clear that, depending on the computer model used, either we could still be in the midst of the pandemic with rising numbers of cases and deaths or we could be nearing the time to reintroduce society to normal operations. Why such disparity? Because each model works a bit differently and depending on the model used and assumptions added in, the results will change, sometimes dramatically.